• Steve Pratt was born into a farming community in 1950 in Zimbabwe. He spent the greater part of his life there in close association with the land as an artist and farmer until the turbulent social and political upheaval under the current dictatorship brought about his exile to the United Kingdom in 2003. He studied painting at the Rhodes University School of Art in South Africa under Brian Bradshaw, and there worked and exhibited with the Grahamstown Group, an association of landscape painters under Bradshaw’s mentorship. He has exhibited in national exhibitions in major centres in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and has held a number of solo exhibitions in Zimbabwe. His work is represented in the public collection of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe.
“For me, painting is a dialogue between the landscape and the artist.
Since childhood I lived and worked closely with the land in Zimbabwe, and its rhythms, forces and tensions shaped and defined me. I saw a landscape implicitly and explicitly charged with forces that were increasingly menacing as the turmoil of social and political upheaval intensified, and in life and art I became aware of the conflict of an identity torn between a deep love of the land and a growing sense of alienation. In this contradiction I found an expression of vibrant energy in the landscape, and I wanted to draw out this force and explore the sense of disquiet that I felt in and around me. This was a defining experience in the dynamic of my relationship with the land. In Africa and now equally in the West Country, the savage soul of the landscape is never far beneath the veneer of man’s quest to tame it. I see the landscape as a living thing with a pulse, a history, a memory and a soul. In the timelessness of its ancient rhythms and 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.
Landscape is the outward expression of the landscape within, and so I paint.” [..] >> Read More |
Steven Pratt - ArtistUniversal
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