Christopher Pratt is one of Canada’s most ‘prominent’ painters. He is now also a published poet.

We talk here, in his home of St Mary’s Bay, Newfoundland on the Salmonier River, about his book A Painter’s Poems (Breakwater Books, 2005), about parallels between his writing and his art, emptiness, loneliness, cleanliness, juxtaposing real and imagined worlds, getting it right, abandonment, absence and how it draws in readers and viewers, leaving important things unsaid, seasons, a man drawing circles in the sand who, when asked why he does it, responds “Well, I’d be a damned fool if I didn’t,” and about how creation involves sharing what is most intimate in order to communicate; in order to find out about and connect with the same in others.