Skip to main content

Toast can save your life, if you let it.

Image: Mary Pratt
To find out how things actually look is a revelation.
— Mary Pratt, 1997

I got to the Mary Pratt exhibit on the very last day of the show.  I took my almost ten year old with me and she was astonished.  It was exciting to be with someone who had never seen her work before.  She kept repeating over and over, "I can't believe they are not photographs."  

She put on the headphones and heard Mary Pratt speak about her art.

At one point she relayed that Mary Pratt thought she was cheating because she painted from photographs.

My daughter shook her head and said simply, "She's no cheat."

I have been to a Mary Pratt exhibit before at the Art Gallery of NS back when I was a university student and she continues to be my favourite artist.  She has definitely made a noticeable impression on my own work.  However, I had not yet seen an image of hers that you can see above called Between the Dark and the Daylight (2011).   It moved me to tears.  After all these years, Mary Pratt's vision has matured and become perfected, but at heart it is still focused on the simplest matters.  The image of translucent toast is both comforting and transcendent.  Toast can save your life if you let it.


Image: Mary Pratt
My only strength is finding something where most people would find nothing. (Mary Pratt)
Labels:

Comments

  1. Kate Hall3/13/2015 10:51 am

    ah, now that is gorgeous. absolutely so. will go now and fill in my sorrowful ignorance of mary pratt. beauty!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kate Hall3/13/2015 10:57 am

    oh my goodness, look. http://picklemethis.com/2013/08/25/mary-pratt/

    ReplyDelete
  3. MotherOfGooses3/14/2015 11:44 am

    ooooh, thanks for sharing this blog post. nice. mary pratt has a knack for making my dirty kitchen glow a little in certain types of light. I' ve a lot to thank her for. She helps me abide in stacks of dirty dishes and laundry piles.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I entered August without you.

 I won't visit you this month.  You won't call. I will raid your garden and you won't get any of the vegetables. I will make plans without telling you about them. We'll go to the store and not buy you one single thing. Whole books will be read and I will not tell you which ones. I will watch movies and not inform you. The nasturiums will ripen. Last month was different. I changed my schedule and took time off work to be with you.   I dropped all kinds of plans for us to be together. You sent me messages, I received them. I picked up food that I thought you would like at the store and sent you pictures of every beautiful thing I saw. I sang with you. We watched the Great Canadian Baking Show. You chose the recipe for the garlic scape pesto and gave me instructions for making the gooseberry jam. I am in August without you. You are in July.
1 comment
Read more

Keep telling yourself that.

We talk to ourselves everyday, all day (and night) for the whole of our lives. We started talking to ourselves before we knew we were a self, we forget what we said because we forget everything from before...when we were too young and busy developing our brain to remember those early years. There is still lingering residue of long forgotten conversations I have had with myself as a toddler sitting around in the crevices...sloughing off occasionally into words I tell myself still.   We talk non-stop, and not just with dialogue.  Our goosebumps communicate to us, our tingly feelings, our neurons, our peripheal vision.  They are all submitting data into our self and expecting us to react, respond or all to often, expecting what they are sending us will be ignored. After all that talking, you'd think we'd know what we think about most things, but occasionally we are stumped.  Unless we stop what we are doing and really concentrate sometimes that voice(s) ...
1 comment
Read more

Shake your Bummy

In recent weeks, two things have come to my attention, this article by Mary Beth Williams,  T he real key to good health  and the viral hit created by Dr. Mike Evans,  23 and 1/2 hours: What is the single best thing we can do for our health?  Both coincided with when I was turning my attention to new years resolutions and reflecting on the year that was. Thanks to both,  a reckoning came to be.  Mary Beth Williams' candid advice was to get your heart stronger because you never know when you are going to need it.  She herself has been receiving treatment for lung cancer. Dr Mike Evans' way of putting the exact same thing? "Try to limit your sitting time to 23 1/2 hours a day".   In my day job, I sit a lot. I occasionally rise to retrieve something from the photocopier or to make a coffee, but an awful lot of the time, I'm on my bum.  This is in steep contrast to my night job. At the end of the work day, occasionally in the middle, I h...
5 comments
Read more