Southwest Art Magazine Sandra Pratt
At 24 years of age, Loveland, CO artist Sandra Pratt feels slightly undeserving of all the accolades her work has received. “Everyone tells me I’m so young,” she said. And she is young but she is also determined and she certainly has worked hard for her successes.
When Pratt first started painting, her work was completely abstract. “I always wanted to make up something of my own,” she said, and, she admits, her work then reflected her totally: “They were confused, disoriented.” Out of high school, she chose the Art Institute of Chicago but after only one semester discovered that the school wasn’t a good match for her. “It wasn’t what I expected,” she said. “It was mostly based on theory and there was no technique taught. I wasn’t being the kind of artist I wanted to be – that really troubled my mind. I thought, is this all there is to art? I wasn’t comfortable with that so I left.”
She moved back to Loveland and modeled for artists at the Loveland Academy while she continued painting at home. Eventually, she sold her first piece for $50 and felt encouraged to make a go of it. These days, she certainly has. “Yeah,” she said, “my parents have actually stopped mentioning that I should get a real job. You know, Look, they have an opening at McDonalds or You should take a course at the community college.”
Surrounded by many artists who make their home in Loveland, Pratt says she never paints with others. She says she is still exploring and that she is sold on the idea of just painting as the best way to grow. “It’s very solitary, I do it alone. I really like to focus.” However, she says, without formal training, that’s not always as easy as it sounds. “It’s hard because I have nothing to base it on like,” she said, “what I’m even trying to do. It’s just been coming out lately.”
But perhaps that’s what is so compelling about Pratt’s work: it is not based on theory, nor is she terribly influenced by others. Unencumbered by outside ideas, she freely puts herself and her deepest thoughts on canvas. She likes the work of Andrew Wyeth, Vincent Van Gogh, and the Russian Impressionists but you wouldn’t necessarily know that from looking at her paintings. She is an intuitive artist whose instinct is genuine and true. She is able to 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.
Her preferred method of applying the paint is with a palette knife. She explained, “You make a mark and it’s there. There is no fussing. It’s quite a statement in itself. I like the intensity of it. I can do so much with it.” Besides, she never could keep brushes clean, “Big failing, still can’t do it, won’t do it,” she said, smiling.
By adding multiple colors then scraping back and smearing over those swipes with the palette knife, Pratt has developed a lyrical style. Of the houses, doorways, roads and trees that emerge from her efforts, she said, “I like to have a little grounding that shows some grasp to reality. I feel more stable about the painting.”
Her habit of working, she admits, is unusual. “When I do feel like it, I’ll go for two days straight and come out with about seven paintings. It seems to hit me all at once.” When working this way, she’ll explore themes and ideas over many canvases. “It’s just a frenzy of painting and I can’t do anything else. The house is a shambles.” And she said, “That’s the reason for all the other bad stuff; when I can’t paint and it frustrates me. It frustrates me -- the worry: Do I even know how to paint? Am I a good artist? When I’m not painting, it gives me too much time to think about it.”
Though Pratt says she feels a little unbalanced that she doesn’t paint every day, she also realizes that she needs to be in the ‘zone’, that state of being completely unaware to the point that the paintings, she believes, just happen, that she’s somehow only there to do the physical work. “I don’t know where is comes from,” she said, “I’ve thought about it a lot because I’d like to regenerate it.”
When she’s not in that zone, she says, her paintings don’t always work out right and she ends up scraping them off completely. “It’s always a good learning experience, though. Scrapers happen when I’m not in my painting thing and there is no point in doing it. But I guess that’s how I learn certain techniques with the knife -- making a mark, working with the paint, just seeing what happens when I look at the colors. But if there’s no art behind it then it’s blah.” Blah paintings, according to Pratt, are when there is no intention. “Being unaware, in the zone – if that’s absent, nothing can come of it. It’s just practice.”
When not painting, Pratt hikes and takes yoga classes and looks for inspirational subject matter. But she said, “It never seems like I can actually do it to myself – be inspired. It just happens and I know what to do in that exact moment. I couldn’t describe it, how I even put paint on the canvas.”
Though her paintings have evolved from completely abstract to where she now explores representational elements, it never feels like Pratt has tried to measure the elements of focus. She doesn’t work from photographs or paint outside on location, nor is she interested in capturing a direct likeness.
Pratt recently finished a painting that she called the Highway because after the poem by Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman. The poem, she felt, described the scene and the mood she tried to capture: “The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, And the highwayman came riding…”
Other paintings of hers are reminiscent of the small towns in France that she linger in her memory from a trip she took when she was 19 or of her travels to New Mexico and around Colorado. The Iowa Farmhouse, a small but spacious landscape with a clean, quaint house perched on a hillside, is like all her work: a compilation of memories, completely made up. Yet, as the viewer it is easy to attach the name of a place to the image depending on your personal frame of reference. She said, “I like that, creating something I never saw but that will affect someone in a different way.”
It is because she is not literal, that the viewer is allowed to interpret her images any way he or she wishes. Perhaps it’s some function of the brain to store memories in a hazy landscape. If so, then Pratt’s work acts as a trip wire triggering those memories. “It’s a great connection to have with people. They say they’ve been there or this looks familiar to me. Some people say that’s Italy or that’s New Zealand, that’s a river or that’s a forest,” she said. “I like my work more by what other people see in it. I just do it and everyone else creates something exciting.”
So how do people react when Pratt tells them that she’s never been to New Zealand or Italy? It doesn’t seem to matter in the least, she said. “I’m sure something must come out in the paintings that other people grasp. It’s like spilling your guts -- that’s what painting is.”
Sandra Pratt will have a one woman show at Deloney Newkirk Fine Art in Santa Fe this June and will be in the All Women show at Coda Gallery in Park City, UT this summer. She also shows with Merrill Johnson Gallery, Denver, CO and Evergreen Fine Art, Evergreen, CO. Her work is on the web at: sandrapratt.com.