Sandra Pratt
ARTIST STATEMENT
"I aspire to create thought provoking images."
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Sandra Pratt
Born 1978
Sandra Pratt’s romantic landscapes and village scenes explore a potential for comfort in open, even barren spaces. Her painted places both reflect time spent in the vastness of Colorado and New Mexico as well as past visits to Western and Northern Europe, Great Britain, Canada, and New England. Sandra will often repeat motifs from these trips, life at the coastal edge of Ireland for instance or in a secluded hamlet lane in France. The sparse compositions present a countryside that is safely isolated from industry and technology. Uninhabited broad village streets draw you into her work and the aged quality of the buildings suggest rugged personalities replete with awkward inadequacies and fallacies.
In the studio, Sandra happily blends the memory of these remote landscapes with her enjoyment of pure paint and an intuitive sense of design. The personal and emotional nature of Sandra’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.
Her panels and canvases are decisively developed in bold, confident shapes of thick de-saturated earthtone colors. With nature and old architecture as her inspiration, her palette has evolved into rich reddish blacks, pale blues, creamy yellows, blue grays, and brownish tans. The places Sandra’s paints into being possess age and history as well as a particular charm from being well used and needed.
Subjects and palettes often recur in Sandra’s paintings, who typically works in spurts, that allow her to rework and make subtle adjustments to previous paintings. She might repeat the same landscape as if haunted or obsessed by a scene, changing just small moments within each version. The immediacy of her palette knife marks and the medium to small scale of her work, provides an intimate experience of these beloved, imagined places.
Sandra’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 currently lives in Houston, TX.
EXHIBITIONS
2011, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 Selby Fleetwood Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
"New Expressionism" Merrill Johnson Gallery
2009 Northern Colorado Artist Association Exhibition, Fort Collings, CO
2007 "The American River" Brattleboro Museum, Brattlevoro, VT
2005 Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, Fort Collins, CO
2005 Allied Artists of America Show, New York, NY
2001 National Works on Paper Show, Houston, TX
1998 Rocky Mountain National Watermedia Exhibitions, Golden, CO
1998 A.R. Mitchell Museum, Trinidad, CO
Publications
2009 Then and Now - Southwest Art Magazine, Dec., 2009
Collector's Coice - Southwest Art Magazine, Nov. 7, 2008
Simply Stated - American Art Collector, Aug. 28, 2008
Dramatic Landscapes - Artbook, May 16, 2005
Colorado: Best of the West - Southwest Art, Nov., 2004
Regional Expressions of America - Wildlife Art, May, 2004
Colorado-Best of the West - Southwest Art, Apr., 2004
Entering the Zone - Focus Magazine, Aug., 2003
Lyrical Creations - Southwest Art, Apr., 2003
21 Under 31 Emerging Artist Issue - Southwest Art, Sep., 2002
