Mary Frances Pratt b.1935

Private Collection, Newfoundland

This painting is in excellent condition with no apparent issues under UV. It has recently been cleaned.
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The student of such prominent Canadian artists as Alex Colville and Lawren P. Harris, Mary Pratt's painting career has at once perpetuated a Canadian artistic lineage and delineated her place of significance among women painters. Her work is deeply personal - the physical result of reflection upon her lived-experience within the domestic domain. Her deceivingly simple subjects (predominantly still life) embody veiled symbolic themes of femininity and how it is constructed in our society. 

Vegetable Marrow, a still life of refined palette, highlights the technical skill that Pratt would continue to develop and later master during her career. The work also exemplifies Pratt's use of contrast to create tension in painting, with the imagery of supple sliced fruit against a steel knife mid-cut. Pratt herself admits of her own process "I see something, I've got to have it, I've got to keep it, I've got to paint it". Vegetable Marrow is a fine example of subject matter compulsively typical of Mary Pratt's oeuvre.