John Christopher Pratt (December 9, 1935 – June 5, 2022) was a Canadian painter and printmaker. He was noted for designing the flag of Newfoundland and Labrador. Early life and education Pratt was born in St. John's, Newfoundland, on December 9, 1935. He first started painting watercolours in 1952 and won the provincial government's Arts and Letters Competition for his piece titled Shed in a Storm. He initially studied pre-engineering at Memorial University of Newfoundland in the autumn of 1952 before relocating to New Brunswick the following year to study pre-medicine at Mount Allison University. However, he quickly became interested in Fine Arts, especially painting. He was encouraged to paint by Lawren P. Harris and Alex Colville. From 1957 to 1959, Pratt studied at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. During the summers, he returned to Newfoundland to work as a construction surveyor at the American Naval Base at Argentia. The training he received in precise measuring was applied to his paintings. In 1959 Pratt returned to Mount Allison University to complete in 1961 a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. During this period he began to make silkscreen prints. The early screen print Boat in Sand, 1961 in the National Gallery's collection was produced at this time and included in the Gallery's fourth Biennial Exhibition. The praise it received from the biennial jury launched Pratt's career. Career Pratt's subjects included landscapes, architecture, and occasionally figure work. I have a profound sense of the power of ordinariness, and of ordinary things ... I mean ordinary in the sense that this is a person, place or thing that has nothing going for it but the fact of its own existence, the fact that it is.... In making prints, Pratt worked from studies to the silkscreen, using abstracted collages. In 1961, Pratt accepted the position of curator at the newly opened Memorial University Art Gallery in St. John's. He remained at the gallery for two and a half years before deciding to concentrate on his painting full-time, moving his family to Salmonier, Newfoundland. His work was the subject of a major touring retrospective organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1985, a touring print retrospective and catalogue raisonné, The Prints of Christopher Pratt: 1958-1991 in 1992, a major traveling retrospective exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Canada in 2005, and a ten-year retrospective of his work at The Rooms in 2015.