Introduction Looking back in 2009 on his life as an artist, Christopher Pratt wrote that he chose painting nearly six decades earlier in order to make images that were tools of disclosure, exorcism and celebration. When he began, it never occurred to him that he or his art would be taken seriously, that he would be able to establish a career and earn a livelihood from painting, printmaking and drawing. Pratt has lived and worked nearly all his life as an artist in the rural village of St. Catherine's, at Salmonier on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland. From this vantage point he has created a remarkable body of work that reflects his vision of the world around him, overlaid with all the perceptual glosses with which reality is defined, place is sensed and a life is lived. His is an art of many complements and paradoxes. A realist, his images are drawn from the complex intersection of memory and place. The specific locations he depicts might be the landscape as seen from the sides of the road or through the windshield, but their mission is to elevate his and our minds beyond the temporary and local to a place that is permanently and deeply embedded in memory.

His art calls on us to plumb the deep recesses of our own imagination and unconscious, to recognize in the familiar an abstract core. Precisely rendered, orderly, tightly composed and rational, the landscapes he depicts as art are born from realms clouded by anxieties, tinged with feelings of loss. More mood poems that riff off the specificities of nature and place, Pratt's images impel viewers to revisit times and locators in their own lives and see the known as richly striated with competing emotions, feelings, ideas, assumptions and expectations. His is a clear world. Yet beyond the clarity of the light that illuminates his painted or printed environments, in the intervals between exact delineation, and from the tenebrous shadows that bathe his nocturnes, a spectral presence seems to imbue each image with a strange and amazing pall. If a machine can be populated by a ghost, a house by a poltergeist, then Pratt creates believable, exact and crystal clear interpretations of subjects that are haunted by dense and rich mosaics of meaning. Pratt's art holds in keen, taut equilibrium an array of tensions that pit the precise against the felt, the known with the imagined, history with myth, the understood with the frightening. Phobias that shake our confidence and dredge long-suppressed neuroses seem to roam, free-floating in the land lying just beyond the windowpane opening on to the river at the edges of his Salmonier property.

In Pratt's visual poetry, the land is as wondrous and memorable as it is threatening and hermetic. The metaphors comprising his painted vocabulary describe an iconography of a life fully engaged in the belief that the world is what the mind creates. In the beginning is the image that renders and tames, in intelligible form, the randomness and uncontrollable truths that lie beyond the perimeters of human consciousness outside the windows of perception.