Charles Spratt A Four-Decade Love Affair

Charles Spratt A Four-Decade Love Affair - theHumm February 2020

By Sally Hansen

Art… and Soul

It is a true gift to discover a passion that endures and rewards for the rest of your life. Charles Spratt is grateful that he has had forty years to enjoy what it took him forty years to realize — he is an artist.

Interviewing artists is always an adventure. When he ushered me into the basement of the tastefully appointed home he shares with his wife Pat in Stittsville, I was astonished. Spratt’s man cave is unusual and fabulous. I would like to return and explore it more fully. It is the antithesis of a basement. It is an art gallery and studio, spotlessly clean, more like the Canada Council’s Art Bank with paintings of all sizes neatly arranged on shelves and stacked along the walls and floor. This is where Charlie, as his friends and family know him, spends his time continually exploring his guiding principle that “I must never stop looking for better ways to express my feelings in art, and that struggling to more fully understand myself is integral to painting itself…”

The paintings are lovely, suffused with Spratt’s “absorption in the wonder and the beauty of the world around me.” He has nourished his love of nature by embarking on plein air painting trips across Canada, frequently in the company of other acclaimed artist friends, and continues his forays into the Ottawa Valley. He uses his plein air acrylic sketches for reference when he returns to his studio to paint larger acrylic works. As expressed in his Artist Statement, he allows “each painting to speak to me as I interpret and develop abstract themes to produce the sense of spirituality that I feel in my work.”

Spirituality is easier to perceive than to define, and Spratt’s paintings resonate with something that captures the viewer’s attention and elicits an emotional, spiritual response. His highly original use of colour and texture, combined with his partial and selective obscuration of detail, result in compelling images. You can live with these paintings and continue to experience a gently visceral as well as a purely aesthetic response. His portraits likewise are intriguing, at the same time questioning and suggesting personalities and life experiences. Charlie seems to have found a way to reflect life’s complexities as well as its promises.

To Improve is to Change

It is a wonderful growth opportunity to have your preconceptions (aka biases) challenged. I don’t usually think of engineers as artists. Until he was forty, Spratt self-identified as an engineer who, with his engineer brother John, worked with their father George H. Spratt at Spratt Sand and Gravel near Carp. His great-grandfather had settled in the Ottawa Valley, and his grandfather had founded the first mining operation in Gloucester Township in 1918. When Charles joined in 1964, their company was the largest sand and gravel company in the Ottawa area. It exists today as Spratt Aggregates on Carp Road. Charles was a businessman, past President of the Aggregate Producers Association of Ontario, and a family man.

His life changed irrevocably when at age forty he decided to give painting a try. As a Queen’s University mechanical engineering student he had always had a flair for drawing, and he remembered his mother sending him for oil painting classes as a twelve-year-old growing up on a farm. Like many other artists I’ve interviewed, he also remembers the first acknowledgement of his talent by a teacher in his one-room Ellwood Public School when he drew a picture of Donald Duck on the blackboard. I hope teachers are aware of the lifelong consequences their encouragement and recognition (and, unfortunately, the opposite) can cause.

Spratt’s friend Graham Lochhead was also interested in art, and the two decided to try painting outdoors with “real brushes and real paints”. That was it. He realized he was handicapping himself by just learning from books and photos, and that he had to learn from nature. Then he became friends with Grant Tigner (a teacher at, and then president of, the Ottawa School of Art), and Charlie’s love of plein air painting was permanently confirmed. He visited Algonquin Park and met other artists, took regular trips with Tigner to one of the oldest art colonies in Gloucester, Mass., and continued to expand his network of like-minded artists. He started the Kidney Foundation Art Festival in Westboro with Peter Germotte; he considers it one of his biggest achievements that it continued for thirteen years as the Ottawa Art Festival.

On Monday mornings he joins a group of artists working on portraits as a means of learning how to better express their feelings. After many, many years of teaching, he finally gave it up when he decided that teaching any one method or technique was too prescriptive. He likens painting to being a jazz guitarist. There are so many ways to play a solo improvisation, and they are all valid. His advice to aspiring artists is to “continue to develop your own statement” — at eighty-plus, Charlie Spratt is still refining his personal message. “The farther you go, the more you learn about yourself — the same for musicians.” Did I mention Spratt is a jazz guitarist?

In addition to over 25 solo gallery exhibitions to date and numerous awards (see Spratt’s bio at koymangalleries.com), Spratt is a past president and fellow of the Ottawa Watercolour Society, and elected signature member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour, the Society of Canadian Artists and the Ontario Society of Artists. He currently is the contact for the Manotick Art Association’s Plein Air Group that meets weekly during the summer, and his enthusiasm for outdoor painting is as vibrant as the inspiration he continues to derive from it. His solo exhibitions, teaching history and inclusion in corporate collections are numerous and nicely itemized on his website at cspratt.ca .

The Ten Collective

On April 4 and 5 Charles Spratt will participate as the invited guest of The Ten Collective in their third annual show to be held in the fascinating Mississippi Valley Textile Museum located in the annex of the former Rosamond Woolen Company in Almonte. Constructed in 1867, this National Historic Site of Canada is well worth a visit all on its own, but this eclectic art show makes it almost imperative that art lovers jump in their cars and attend. Details are available at thetencollective.com , and don’t fail to clip Charlie’s Trading Card on the back of this page.

In memoriam – Dr. Bill Buttle - theHumm February 2020

By Kris Riendeau

I honestly can’t remember when Bill Buttle first started contributing Artbeat cartoons to theHumm, but I think it was some time within our first year of publishing. So for the past two decades (give or take a year or two), his humorous take on the world of art and music has had pride of place here on page 2. On Sunday, January 19, Bill passed away peacefully in Arnprior at the age of 79, leaving behind grieving family and friends as well as legions of Artbeat fans throughout......

Charles Spratt A Four-Decade Love Affair - theHumm February 2020