Spring at My Place, 1985

The painting resonates with other works that explore the same motif. In March Night, 1976, the wall is bathed in artificial glow, emphasizing how easily atmosphere shifts our sense of place. In Wall Facing West, 1980, the same side of the house appears, but here the background reveals a glimpse of ocean and grass—a landscape not normally seen from the banks of the Salmonier River—hinting at a dream of elsewhere, imagined from home. In Fall at My Place (Some Shadows on My House), 2004, Pratt revisited the subject. His own shadow enters, arms crossed (as in his Mount Allison University self-portrait)—acknowledging the artist’s presence in the act of looking. Together, these works reveal the persistence of certain images in Pratt’s imagination and his ability to draw infinite variation from a single, familiar site.

This attention to his own house places Spring at My Place within Pratt’s larger cycle of what he called “Places of Memory”—roads, buildings, and interiors that he revisited across decades. The wall of his home became an anchor point for him, a key place in his personal geography. By returning to it season after season, Pratt showed that memory and meaning reside not only in distant landscapes but also in the walls that hold the rhythms of the everyday.