Creative Profile – William G. Prettie, BFA
The CKACN is paying tribute to the people in our community who are passionate about he arts, invest in the arts in our community and who inspire others.
Artist Statement
The poet of the textual form “Blackens the Page” (Leonard Cohen) to allow us to see through some darkness or other to another way of seeing. Abstraction, in any guise, is one form of the poetry of visual art. This is my daily practice.
Abstraction allows for the philosophers “co-presence” (Krieglstein). At one and the same time, the story is likely to be of withholding and revealing, or presenting on the surface and investigating underneath. For the artist, a secular journeying into spirit.
It often takes a small amount of thought to read the allegory presented, the metaphors used, the layers interwoven and one’s own insights in understanding each work. The range goes from mixed media on various substrates to soapstone stories.
Artist Bio
William G. Prettie was born in 1947 in a Barrie, Ontario hospital that is no longer there. My Dad was a career army, posted to Camp Borden with my Mom, his Scottish born war bride. When it approached the time for him to retire from the forces, he took a final posting to London’s CFB Wolseley Barracks. This resulted in me spending my teenage years in and around the London area.
Later on, as a young man looking for opportunity, I moved west and in essence spent the next fifty years living away form here, but travelling back for family gatherings, either for pleasure or necessity.
In 1992 I was accepted to what was then known as Okanagan University College, Kelowna B.C. into their 4 year Fine Art degree program. In my second year the University of Victoria took it over and after being awarded a third year tuition scholarship and winning the Helen Pitt award for my 4th year show, I graduated (with distinction) with a University of Victoria’s Fine Arts degree and with minor studies in Sociology. It happened that I wanted some other 4th year classes the next year that they were being offered for the first time and so I stayed to do those.
I supported myself and my family ever since with art production, curation and invitational lecturing in the extension fine arts program at the University of Alberta and a variety of other work to sustain the body.
When it came time to retire from other pursuits and concentrate on the Art alone, I came back to this area and settled in Highgate. Fortunately, The Mary Webb Centre for the Arts is located here and needed a gallery director, so I took that on in 2015 and stayed in that post for 3 years. My first major show in London was in the Hassan Law building in December 2014 with a friend named Jamie Jardine.
I show intermittently and work in the studio in my home on a regular basis.
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