George Pratt of Halfmoon Bay is a professional sculptor whose artistic achievement recently showcased on the world's stage. His giant jade carving, The Emperor's Sunrise, has become the striking focal point at the entrance to the Canada/B.C. Pavilion just off Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, and it will stay at that location throughout the Summer Olympic Games that start Aug. 8.
Pratt is a 40-year career artist working with granite, marble and jade, including such works as the Terry Fox memorial in Port Coquitlam and commissioned gifts for royalty. He had his eye on the piece of nephrite jade ever since it was first uncovered in northern B.C. and long before he was asked to carve it.
"It weighed 10,000 pounds. No one could afford to move it," he said. That is, until wealthy Sydney Belzberg, known for his philanthropic works, acquired the stone for placement on his Vancouver property and commissioned the sculptor to work on it. Pratt understands the principle of "less is more." When he examined the piece of jade, he knew he needed subject matter that would be less intricate than usual and would allow the magnificent stone to show off its natural qualities. The resulting work reveals the sun emerging from jagged mountain peaks after a painting style found in Chinese watercolours. The orb has been smoothed and polished; the mountains have been "fretted," a style of carving that leaves a rough-hewn look. (Jade is such a hard mineral that a sculptor can wear out tools working on it.)
When the Olympic secretariat was searching for an appropriate pavilion artwork created from a typical British Columbia natural resource, the Belz-bergs offered the loan of The Emperor's Sunrise, valued at $1.3 million.
At a May ceremony, Pratt and his wife Marjorie joined Premier Gordon Campbell and various federal government dignitaries, including Syd and Joanne Belzberg, at the sculpture's temporary location in China. Everyone gave the stone a rub for luck.
Pratt keeps a working studio in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, but for the past two years he and his wife have considered the Coast to be home. They visited a cottage at Sandy Hook for years, and after buying in Halfmoon Bay, they have committed to the Coast in a big way.
"It's the best of every world living here," he said. "There are so many folksy, real people here. It's reminiscent of Haliburton County in Ontario where I'm from."
He was eager to do something that would mark his arrival and he taught a sold out watercolour course at paper artist Nadine Wong's art studio last spring. Then he submitted a proposal for an artwork to be built on the refurbished Block 7. Recently, the District of Sechelt announced that his proposal has been accepted (along with another work by Anna Hanson). He's as tickled as if he had been asked to work on another Olympic project.
"It's for my new home town," he said by way of explanation, and he thought long and hard about an appropriate sculpture. As a working artist, he has served on Vancouver's public art committee and understands its requirements. An artwork must be vandal proof, for example, and must confer a sense of place.
"It can't be just plop art," he said, "nice, but not adding to the location in any way." Mostly, it must be something that people will like. It's sunny here, he thought. What about a sundial? It's not a new idea. Years ago, he created a sundial as a gift from Vancouver to the city of Guangzhou, China, but Pratt has given this latest design a light-hearted flavour. His proposal involves an equatorial sundial, about adult size in height, hewn from granite and with a dial face in increments of measurement. A stainless steel gnomon (raised bar that casts a shadow) points at the North Star. "Though we live in a digital world," he wrote in his proposal, "there has never been a replacement for the understandings a sundial gives us about the earth and its movements, about geography and geometry and mathematics."
