INTRODUCTION

From an article in Southwest Art Magazine by Susan Embry

	After years as an animator, craft shops and restaurant owner, Pratt devoted full time since 1980 to
	painting wildlife along the Texas Gulf Coast. Working on a large scale with canvases stretching upwards
	of 3x4 feet, he devotes as much as 80 percent of the space to developing the sky. " There's hardly a
	day when the Gulf Coast area isn't dotted with those nice big cumulus clouds " he explains, adding
	that he especially enjoys the drama of dark skies and stormy seas.
	To his skyscapes, Pratt usually adds birds, contrastingly calm and at peace with their environment.
	His models are encountered on hunting trips and in the boxes of birds skins that occupy the book-
	shelves in his studio. Whether it's geese, pintails, cranes or widgeons, the flocks of birds move the
viewer's eye through the painting and frequently lead to small wonders that Pratt puts in his scenes.
What compels Pratt to devote so much space to the sky ? He says it's because the sky is so complex a subjects that
he'll never be content with his representation of it. The shifting, illusive nature of light and the ambience it creates is
especially intriguing to him. Shooting out of a growing bank of dramatic cumulonimbus clouds and filtering through
heavy, humid atmosphere, the light of the Gulf Coast has a quality all its own. Pratt likes to explore how it reflects off
rooftops or in watery irrigation ditches; or geese into a hunter's range. In endless shades of gray, he captures the seem-
ingly infinite distances viewed from earth that he once projected as though observed from space. Somewhere in between
them, at the horizon with a good sunrise, is where his heart lies.
Susan Embry

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