The images of acclaimed painter and printmaker Christopher Pratt are both immediately understandable and forever mysterious. Private School is an exemplary case in point. Clearly, we see the unpeopled interior of a large building. The prominent, architecturally complex window that centres the work and is its literal subject is set into an alcove, which admits a halo-like light around its perimeter. The mullioned window at first reveals little beyond its own form, yet there is in the bottom range of panes a faint sense of a differentiating line outside. Is this a horizon, perhaps seen in winter, or through fog, or in half-light? We do not—and likely cannot—know, but Pratt already has us wondering and therefore looking more closely.

Pratt’s scenes are typically too perfect to be mistaken for reality. His pictures of the outsides and—less frequently—the interiors of buildings are observed in every detail, to the extent that they seem to exist in another dimension, familiar yet beyond our everyday experience. They hover on the edge of strangeness yet are not threatening. Private School was painted the year following the artist’s 1986 retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario. In an interview at the time, he explained that he creates his paintings only to “satisfy some requirement that’s entirely personal.”[1] Pratt’s precisely rendered subjects are of import to him, but he does not seek to tell us why or to guide our looking. What Private School means to its viewers is more significant than what it might have meant to the artist, even if we knew. We are left alone (and given the latitude) to understand this painting in our own terms.

We might appreciate the extensive range of blue and aquamarine tints Pratt employs on the tiles so prominent in the picture, in the painted area at the top, with its lighter blue shadows cast by the mullions, and, most importantly, at the very bottom of the canvas. Here the anchoring range of rectangular (no longer square, as they were on most of the wall), dark-blue tiles adjoins another “horizon” line. These tiles, which seem to be on the floor, alternate in hue. To make our understanding of this space even more challenging, there also appears to be a seam between these floor tiles and larger ones running into our space at the bottom of the image. These forms again alternate shades of blue. Through meticulous description, endless care and an abundance of clarity, Pratt has made the subject enigmatic. One reading is that we see the walls and surrounding walkway of a large swimming pool at a private school. But this suggestion does not regularize or explain the painting, which instead multiplies its appealing enigmas.

We thank Mark A. Cheetham for contributing the above essay. He is the author of several books on art in Canada, including Alex Colville: The Observer Observed, Jack Chambers: Life & Works and Remembering Postmodernism. He is a professor of art history at the University of Toronto and a freelance curator and artwriter.

1. CBC, “Christopher Pratt: A Retrospective of His Work,” February 21, 1986, http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2454733682.