Driving to Venus: On the Burgeo Road, 2000

“Few things are as time-out-of-life as driving,” Christopher Pratt once wrote. “Sometimes I think I could drive forever.”​​ Driving to Venus: On the Burgeo Road can be seen as both a personal reflection and a broader symbol. It evokes the act of moving through familiar places while also looking up and outward. It’s about the tension between the known and the unknown, and the stillness that often defines Canadian art, and particularly the atmosphere of the island of Newfoundland when experienced by car.

For Pratt, driving was a form of meditation—an act of slipping into the in-between, where attention sharpened and time loosened its hold. At night, the experience deepened with the stars scattered above, the looming possibility of a moose at the roadside, and the narrow ribbon of road illuminated only by the car’s headlights. In that space, the world seemed suspended, outside of time. And as often happens in Newfoundland, the viewer is utterly alone—the only car moving through the night.

Driving to Venus: On the Burgeo Road belongs to a series of “road” paintings that trace liminal states—such as Driving to Venus: From Eddies Cove East, 2000, and Winter Solstice Drive to St. Anthony, Full Moon Rising, 2008—where the viewer experiences journeys through darkness, headlights, and framed views. Pratt’s night drive series reflects a broader tradition in Canadian art that looks at how landscape and identity are connected. Like depictions of the northern wilderness by the Group of Seven, Pratt’s roads tap into something shared in the national imagination. But where other artists show vast, heroic landscapes, Pratt’s night skies and highway arcs are more intimate, rooted in the experience of driving through his home province, especially at night, reflecting a more internal journey.