Steven Pratt
“For
me, painting is a dialogue between the landscape and the artist.
Please, tell us where you are from.
I come from Zimbabwe, where I have spent
the greater part of my life in a farming community. There I lived in
close association with the land as an artist and farmer until the
turbulent social and political upheaval under the current
dictatorship brought about my exile to the United Kingdom in 2003.
Please, tell us
about your paintings.
I am a landscape painter. For me painting is a dialogue between the
landscape and the artist, and the landscape is a living thing with a
pulse, a history, a memory and a soul. In the timelessness of its
ancient rhythms, its raw structure and the transience of its
poignant monuments to human endeavour, it is pregnant with
associations of exhilaration, pain, yearning, dread, nostalgia and
hope. I paint landscape because it is it is a reflection of the
human spirit. It is the outward expression of the landscape within.
Do you feel yourself British or Zimbabvian?
In Zimbabwe I wanted to explore my identity as a white man in Africa through painting. In a forgotten little country torn by war in the 1980s, civil strife in the nineties and the slide into brutal and tyrannical dictatorship today, there was a rich though traumatic field of experience in which I found myself torn between a deep love of Africa and a growing sense of alienation in an increasingly hostile environment. As an artist sensitive to this inward and outward conflict, and in my own involvement in the tragedy unfolding around me, I found myself face to face with the reality of a general crisis of identity in Africa. Of course, with exile that crisis became a very personal one, but now exile has made me a citizen of the world.
© Steven Pratt
These are experiences that have profoundly influenced the direction
of my life, and an undercurrent of unease and anxiety thus pervades
much of my work. I try to generate tension as a basis of the
expressive energy in a painting. This tension, at times disturbing
or even uncomfortable, blurs the line between real and unreal, sense
and nonsense, humour and tragedy. A familiar subject might appear in
an incongruous context, and it is the strangeness of such an
encounter that creates energy. I often exploit the expressive
potential of symbolism as a way of creating that tension, although
the symbol develops intuitively and without defined meaning. The
important thing at the time is the magic in the act of painting, and
in due course the work grows towards its meaning so that the
significance of the symbolism resolves and reveals itself.
Sometimes, uncannily, this revelation is startling, as if the
painting were a premonition.
© Steven Pratt
I work thickly in oils, balancing control with a fluid process of
building up, moving and removing paint, and in this way I give the
painted surface the scope it needs to find its own way organically.
This process has an element of unpredictability, which for me is
essential to move the process away from rigid control, the
predictable route, and a destination known in advance; towards
intuition, a journey of adventure into the unknown, and discovery.
Paintings Copyright © Steven Pratt