Sold for: $79,250

PROVENANCE
Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Tom Smart, Christopher Pratt: Six Decades, Art Gallery of Sudbury, 2013, pages 60 and 152, and similar works from the 2009 Winter Suite series reproduced pages 152 and 153

Everywhere I go on the shores of this great island [Newfoundland] I see wide, high skies and immense acreages of water stretching to an horizon as straight as sight, with wind lines and ice lines as straight as the horizon itself…I wanted to do it in this format because that is what these “minimalist” paintings have been all about—seasons of the year, times of the day, the directions to infinity.

—Christopher Pratt, regarding his Winter Suite series

Since the early 1970s, Christopher Pratt has been painting minimalist views of sea, land and sky, as in West of the Sun. As Tom Smart observed, “In Pratt’s art the sea signifies infinite space and time.” Paintings such as this, stripped of detail and almost abstract, glow with delicate atmospheres that radiate throughout an expansive space, whose very emptiness allows the viewer to infuse their own feelings into the works as they contemplate them. West of the Sun is a particularly evocative work from this part of Pratt’s oeuvre, with its exquisite sky illuminated by a warm glow at the horizon that gradually diffuses upward and fades into the blue firmament.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars