Mary Frances Pratt, LL. D. D.Litt. (née West) (March 15, 1935 – August 14, 2018) was a Canadian painter known for photo-realist still life paintings. Pratt never thought of her work as being focused on one subject matter: her early work is often of domestic scenes, while later work may have a darker undertone, with people as the central subject matter. She painted what appealed to her, being emotionally connected to her subject. Pratt often spoke of conveying the sensuality of light in her paintings, and of the "erotic charge" her chosen subjects possessed. Career Painting Mary Pratt's work focused on her relationship with domestic life in rural Newfoundland and common household items: jars of jelly, apples, aluminum foil, brown paper bags. Using photographic projections while painting, Pratt's style was bold and flamboyant, rendering her subject vivid and realistic. Due to this transformation of the mundane into something aesthetic, "she may have had more influence on shaping the way we see things than any Canadian painter since the Group of Seven". Pratt arrived at her signature style in the late 1960s, after discovering that light was her central subject and deciding to incorporate photography into her artistic process. Her paintings The Bed (1968) and Supper Table (1969) are the earliest examples of her characteristic style. In 1978 Pratt's painting Girl in a Wicker Chair, created that year, was published on the cover of Saturday Night magazine. This was the first of an extended series of paintings on Donna Meaney, who first served as a model for Pratt's artist husband, Christopher Pratt and with whom he reportedly had a brief affair. Some of Pratt's paintings of Donna were based on her husband's photographs. These works are markedly different from those composed and photographed by Pratt herself. Pratt's portraits of Meaney embody a noticeable tension that is absent in her husband's paintings of her. However, Pratt always regarded Meaney as a friend. In the 1980s Pratt continued exploring new subject matter and media. She created a series of paintings on weddings, including a portrait of her daughter Barbara, entitled Barby in the Dress She Made Herself (1986). Another series consists of paintings and mixed-media drawings of fires, which function as a metaphor for sacrifice. Using pastels and coloured pencils in this series enabled Pratt to work on a larger scale than she had previously done in oils. In the early 1990s Pratt