I was saddened to read about the recent death of Newfoundland’s own Mary Pratt, a timeless painter of realistic scenes, often deceptively plain and domestic.
The comparisons with the work of Alice Munro are clear, and I was very glad to bring the two artists together by using Mary Pratt’s evocative image of a dress on a clothesline for Friend of My Youth in 1990, and of an unmade bed on the cover of Alice’ s Runaway in 2004.
Alice’s biographer, Robert Thacker, in Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, notes that “Gibson’s comment that he and Munro had been looking for “just the right”magic realist painting is indicative, too, since as her Canadian editor he justifiably prided himself on the choice of appropriate artworks for her dust jackets. Given the initial Rose-Janet relation in Who Do You Think You Are, they first settled on a detail from Christopher Pratt’s Young Woman in a Slip, where the young woman is looking into a mirror, rejecting it (though it was later used on the dust jacket of the Canadian edition of The Moons of Jupiter), they ultimately opted for a detail of Ken Dandy’s The Sunbather”.
To my great pleasure,Thacker ends this paragraph with the observation: “Gibson’s covers, from this one to the painting of a dishevelled bed by Mary Pratt on the dust jacket of Runaway have been capsule symbols of the elegant everyday found in Munro’s writing”.
“The elegant everyday”! Perfect.
And as Canadian magic realism flourished, I was thrilled to be able to use paintings by people like Mary Pratt, and Christopher Pratt, and Alex Colville ( Elm Tree at Horton’s Landing, on the cover of The Progress of Love).
A great generation of artists.