Christopher Pratt, who cast a mysterious and magical aura over the Newfoundland and Labrador landscape with artwork that achieved international acclaim, has died. He was 86.
He died early Sunday morning, his family said in a statement.
“He died as he wished, surrounded by family and friends in his home of 59 years on the Salmonier River,” the family’s statement said.
He is survived by four children and other family. Acclaimed painter Mary Pratt, described in the family statement as his “best friend and sometime wife,” died in 2018.
“It’s a big loss, to so many. Canada has lost a great artist,” said Emma Butler, a friend of Pratt’s and founder of Emma Butler Gallery in St. John’s.
Pratt was often called one of Canada’s greatest painters over the course of his extensive and successful career, which earned him appointment to both the Order of Canada and the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador. His work is held in galleries from coast to coast to coast, including the National Gallery of Canada.
His decades of paintings and prints centre on Newfoundland landscapes and experiences: the gaze out to sea, snow settled on an upturned dory, barren stretches of the Trans-Canada Highway. In his signature meticulous style, Pratt transports viewers with his often eerily lit vistas to territory that exists somewhere between the lifelike and the surreal.
“There’s magic in his paintings,” said Tom Smart, the director of the Beaverbrook Gallery in Fredericton and author of Christopher Pratt: Six Decades.
“He’s called a magic realist for a reason. You look at his paintings and it’s almost as if they’re looking back at you.”
Winter at Whiteway, a 2004 painting by Pratt. (Christopher Pratt/Mira Godard Gallery)
That unsettling gaze marked much of Pratt’s art.
“His paintings have a lot of depth,” said Smart. “You can appreciate the picture; he’s painting a building or a landscape that’s familiar to everybody, But then when you start to look at it, you say, ‘Well, wait a minute — there’s some things that are going on here.'”
Pratt made no secret that his works edited out the clutter of the world. He’d remove stains and straighten lines to create complex, alternate versions of reality.
“The straight lines and precision and all that — the control in my work — is just a facade,” Pratt told CBC Radio’s On The Go in 2018.
“Because my life and my thoughts and my anxieties and whatnot are anything but neat and controlled and orderly.”
Christopher Pratt’s 2013 painting, Argentia: The Ruins of Fort McAndrew: After the Cold War. Argentia, a former Second World War U.S. military base on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, was a favourite site of Pratt’s to visit and paint. (Christopher Pratt/Mira Godard Gallery)
From Confederation to the flag design
Pratt’s works give few easy answers. Instead, they reward those willing to spend time with them, and what they say about his deep affection for Newfoundland and Labrador.
“He loved this place. He loved this wild, unpredictable, beautiful place,” said Butler.
“And he travelled it, and he painted it with love and reverence. And if you couldn’t see the love and reverence in his paintings, then you were just missing out on what he was saying.”
Pratt’s 1998 oil painting Benoit’s Cove: Sheds in Winter. Pratt often went on road trips around Newfoundland, and would include this fish plant on his route. (Christopher Pratt/The Rooms Collection)
That love led to an unusual honour, considering his lineage: Pratt was born in 1935, in the governmental grey era after Newfoundland surrendered its self-governing status to the United Kingdom and effectively operated as a British territory until Confederation with Canada in 1949.
Both sides of Pratt’s family stretched back generations in Newfoundland, and many of them were staunchly opposed to joining Canada. Pratt became a Canadian at 13, and often said he had vivid memories and associations to the pre-Confederation era.
Then in 1980, with his art career in full swing, Pratt was picked to design the provincial flag (until then, the Union Jack had been doing the job).
Pratt put his noted work ethic to use, creating dozens of flag designs before settling on the one still flying today, which contains subtle nods to the British, maritime and Beothuk histories of the place.
The flag was divisive upon its arrival, and Pratt was at times ambivalent about it himself — he once described himself as a reluctant “show doctor” who agreed under pressure to help break an impasse among politicians on a design — but was clear on one point.
“I did the best I could possibly do,” he told CBC in 1980.
“I think that the committee might well have found a better designer, I don’t dispute that. But I would say with all modesty, that they would not have found anybody who cared more about the province.”
Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial flag, designed by Pratt, was unveiled on April 29, 1980. (The National/CBC Archives)
‘I love what I do’
Pratt spent almost all his life based on Newfoundland’s east coast, but left the province early on for higher education, picking out a pre-medicine degree at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B.
Medicine didn’t last. Pratt was drawn to the school’s fine arts department and fell under the spell of his early mentor and teacher, Alex Colville, whose style influenced Pratt’s own.
Mount Allison also introduced Pratt to his future first wife, Mary, an immense painting talent in her own right. Together they, Colville and painter Tom Forrestall pushed forward the school of magic realism painting, creating a force in Atlantic Canadian art that would define the national scene for decades.
With arts degrees from both Mount Allison and the Glasgow School of Art in hand, the Pratts returned to Newfoundland and Christopher began his career in earnest. His works were well received from early on, and alongside curating and teaching, he was able to devote himself to his art, which he did, prolifically, for the rest of his life.
Pratt worked in many mediums, such as watercolour, seen here in his 2004 painting, Fall At My Place (Some Shadows On My House). (Christopher Pratt/Private Collection)
“I love what I do. I don’t consider it to be work. I never have. It’s a rich, satisfying hobby at which I am fortunate to make actually a good living —so far, ” Pratt said in an 2015 interview about his retrospective exhibit, The Places I Go, which focused on a defining aspect of his life and work: Newfoundland road trips.
Pratt’s pilgrimages
Pratt travelled the island often and extensively, akin to “a pilgrimage,” said Mireille Eagan, who curated The Places I Go in her role as curator of contemporary art at The Rooms, the St. John’s cultural complex that includes the provincial art gallery.
Eagan took two such trips with Pratt, racking up thousands of kilometres across Newfoundland as he sought his muse.
As befits such a disciplined artist, his road trips were well ordered. Eagan said he visited the same places each time: from his parents’ graves to buildings he had painted to favourite highway rest stops.
“He would tell me stories along the way. And every river that we passed, every tree that had held meaning to him, he would talk about,” said Eagan.
“We would talk about the history of this province, which he knew intimately.… It was important for him to remember this place. And he did so through his paintings.”
“If there’s a large kind of theme to his paintings, it’s works that are images that are seen from the road,” said Smart.
Deer Lake: Junction Brook Memorial, a 1999 Pratt oil painting of the Deer Lake Powerhouse, is in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, a gift from David and Margaret Marshall. (Christopher Pratt/Mira Godard Gallery)
Trips included stops such as the Deer Lake Powerhouse, a stately building of glowing mullions that became the subject of one of his most well-known works, Deer Lake: Junction Brook Memorial.
“It’s just such an extraordinary painting,” said Smart.
“You wonder why he turned his attention to this power station, and put so much time into painting it … but it gives me enormous, enormous satisfaction to look at it and to travel into that landscape. To be lost in it, to be afraid of it, too.”
The painting’s title hints at memories of the wild waterway, long since tamed for human use — its electricity still supplies the pulp and paper mill in nearby Corner Brook — with that subtle nod one of the many times Pratt used his art to testify to the history of his beloved province.
Belying that serious edge, “a road trip with Christopher Pratt is pretty funny,” Eagan said. They’d listen to Frank Sinatra or jazz, and the human warmth behind so many wintry paintings would shine through.
“He was a very humble man. He can come across as a bit cold, but he’s not. He was a humble and compassionate person,” she said.
Pratt was also a complex man who sought honesty and deep thinking from friends and family, said Smart.
The Lynx, a 1965 screenprint by Pratt. (Christopher Pratt/Beaverbrook Art Gallery)
A ‘deeply personal’ painter
His family dynamic was infamously complex. Mary Pratt, who initially set aside her art career to support her husband’s and raise their four children — John, Anne, Barbara and Ned — would come to embrace her immense talent for painting the quotidian into the sublime.
The two divorced after decades of marriage, with Christopher remarrying, but an artistic connection and respect remained.
“Both Mary and Christopher told me that they saw in in each other excellence, artistic excellence and tremendous creativity,” said Smart.
“Throughout their careers, they worked closely together. Particularly near the end of both of their lives, they reconciled and would have conversations that would influence each other’s art practice out of deep respect,” said Eagan.
Trongate Abstract, a 2018 painting inspired by a devastating fire years earlier at Pratt’s alma mater, the Glasgow School of Art. Pratt dedicated the work to his former wife, Mary Pratt, after her death. (Christopher Pratt/The Rooms Collection)
Mary Pratt died in 2018 at 83. That same year, Christopher Pratt painted Trongate Abstract, inspired by a devastating fire at the Glasgow School of Art, his alma mater.
The seemingly cool composition hints at emotion — but only if you flip it over to the dedication on its back: “To Mary.”
“His paintings are deeply personal and deeply felt,” said Eagan.
“I know that many, many will look at his work and they’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s so cold,’ but in fact, it isn’t.… This is a way of remembering. And so when we look at his paintings, we’re looking at him.”
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
