Sandra Pratt
Artist statement:
Sandra Pratt is an American painter who anchors her artistic vision in landscape, cityscape, and coastal painting. Her impressionist style is infused with boldness, spontaneity, and emotion, her every knife stroke strives to capture reality through the lens of her imagination and personal feelings. It is her unique experiences that enable her to bring seemingly ordinary scenes to life on canvas by employing a plethora of unconventional painting techniques.
My approach to making art is guided by intuition and intense observation of the subject. The act of painting releases a stream of consciousness and creative energy that reveals my view of reality. The tension between visual perception and engaging with the paint itself guides my process. It straddles the line between realism and abstraction. Painting leaves a record of my experience. It is my most poignant and genuine means of expression. My paintings are not intended to convey a specific message, but rather to evoke an emotion from the viewer.
Biography:
The personal and emotional nature of Pratt’s work is influenced by her self-taught approach to working with composition, oil paint, and the palette knife. Years dedicated to a singular mode of working have resulted in dexterous paint handling and a strengthening of her themes of home, community, and landscape. Her harmonious compositions are rooted in an ever-present horizon line and often entice the viewer through a strong use of linear perspective, drawing the eye into and through an anonymous village street or to the door of a lone house on the prairie.
The immediacy of Pratt’s palette knife marks and the medium to small scale of her work, provides an intimate experience of these beloved, imagined places. Pratt’s work has been exhibited at the Brattleboro Museum in Vermont, with the Allied Artists of America in NY, and at the A.R. Mitchell Museum and the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado. Sandra Pratt is from Chicago, IL she currently lives in Colorado.
"She is an intuitive artist whose instinct is genuine and true. She can take in her surrounding, whether they be an alleyway in Europe, a show at a museum, or a poem from her childhood, and transcribe those ideas onto canvas. Emotional and spontaneous, she has a gut reaction to the paint and how it should be used."
-Southwest Art Magazine