Name: TVO Arts - Mary Pratt, Jelly Shelf
Description: One of Canada’s most beloved painters reveals the wonder and significance hiding within the ordinary domestic life of cooking, cleaning and, of course, making jellies.

Learn how to decode Canadian art | TVO Arts

When you look closely, ask questions and take your time, the artwork begins to speak to you differently.

My only strength is finding something where most people would find nothing.

One of Canada’s most beloved painters reveals the wonder and significance hiding within the ordinary domestic life of cooking, cleaning and, of course, making jellies.

TVO Arts - Mary Pratt, Jelly Shelf 

Narrator (00:02):
Art can help us to see the meaning and magic that's hidden all around us.
(00:07):
This is "Jelly Shelf". It is one of the best known works by painter Mary Pratt, who was recognized as one of Canada's greatest artists and also something of a feminist icon. It was painted in 1999, and it's been shown in galleries all over the country. It's even been on a stamp. But what is it about this simple domestic scene that's captured our imagination so vividly?
Alex (00:31):
So I see a bunch of jars and I can't really tell what's in them, but my first instinct is to say, jam.
Julia (00:39):
Although it's food, I see light and warmth.
Uju (00:43):
Is this a photograph or is it like a painting?
Narrator (00:46):
Although it looks so real, you can almost taste it. "Jelly Shelf" is an oil painting. Four glass jars of differently colored jellies rest on a shiny surface. It captures the fleeting moments when sunlight passing through. The jellies sets the container spectacularly a glow like colored lanterns without a trace of brushwork. The painting looks like a picture from a glossy magazine. Its sharp foreground and hazy out of focus background resembles the way a camera sees like a photograph with a shallow depth of field. Perhaps those containers of jelly remind you of something or maybe someone.
Christian (01:23):
I recognize those jars. They seem like they are part of my family history or something I know from my mother's shelves as something I know from my grandmother's shelves.
Uju (01:36):
So the first thing I think of looking at this is home, and I mean home. Not in the sense of house, but in the sense of comfort, in the sense of belonging.
Narrator (01:47):
Pratt was born Mary Francis West in Frederickton, New Brunswick in 1935. Her mother hand coloured photographs a hobby. She also taught to her children. From a young age, Mary learned to pay careful attention to the whole spectrum of colors. You can see learning that hidden and even the most familiar things are shades you'd never have expected. A closer look can reveal all sorts of little surprises.
(02:12):
At the age of 18, she began studying fine arts at Mount Allison University. Her teachers included celebrated painter, Alex Coleville and Lawren Phillips Harris, son of one of the group of seven founders. It was there that Mary met Christopher Pratt, a student who was also interested in painting and who would become her husband. Just a few years later, after the couple married and began having children, they both returned to Mount Allison to continue their studies. That's when Harris, Mary's teacher told her, "you have to understand in a family of painters, there can only be one painter and in your family, it's Christopher".
(02:50):
She took his words as a challenge, but with four kids in a home to look after, Mary found that raising children and housework left little time her own painting. While Christopher, with his mysterious brand of smoothly rendered realism, saw his career skyrocket, hers, stagnated.
(03:09):
Then in the late 1960s, Mary experienced two sparks of inspiration that would ignite her unique artistic voice. One fall morning, she was struck by the gorgeous light falling upon their unmade bed. The scene was so charged that she said it felt like a punch in the gut. In that moment, she decided that's what she would paint scenes from her everyday life that demanded a closer look.
(03:35):
Not long after a second spark would determine her process. At the sight of the family's cluttered dinner table, Mary got that same gut feeling and sprang up to grab her sketching tools. Christopher pointed out the light was fading quickly. She'd never sketched it in time. So he quietly fetched his camera and photographed the supper table, giving her the pictures as slides. Once they were developed for Mary, the photographic slides were a game changer full of tiny details I might miss. Photography enabled her to save the fleeting moments so she could vividly recreate them and paint long after they had passed.
(04:12):
For the entirety of her five decade long career. She worked in this way to capture those charged scenes from her daily life gaining national renowned for her, highly realistic still lifes that invited the viewer into her home. Of course, many artists use photographs as reference, but it's what Pratt did with the photos that made her work so special.
Mary Pratt (Artist) (04:33):
I go and get my camera and I photograph what is saying to me. Paint me. I'm important. I don't ever want to be forgotten.
Narrator (04:42):
Slides allowed her to project the photograph onto her canvas and trace the image directly painting in the basic elements of the picture. She then used small sable brushes, typically for watercolor painting, and worked in tiny crosshatch strokes, applying color from the top corner of the canvas to the bottom. She would build up the painting like this layer after layer until it achieved a lifelike appearance. The accumulation of such fine layers made her brush strokes virtually invisible As she painted, she referenced a slide viewer, a device that both enlarged and illuminated the original photograph, which perhaps explains why her paintings often appear to glow.
Andre (05:23):
She definitely has a great eye for detail and making sure to capture every single thing that she sees.
Alex (05:30):
I feel like with a painting, you can adjust the light much easier. You can change the colors much more. You can add colors to it.
Christian (05:38):
It's got to be a labour of love to be able to spend that much time painting a piece of painting a fish on a piece. Plastic wrap.
Narrator (05:47):
Pratt is often associated with a genre of art known as 'photorealism', emerging in the 1960s. 'Photorealism' is a style that represents subject in an accurate and detailed way, like a photograph. There's a long tradition of Canadian realist painters from Pratt's day right to the present. But beyond a likeness to her source photograph. What Pratt strove to capture was the original feeling that the scene inspired that magic spark that made her grab her camera in the first place.
(06:18):
Pratt's work can also be understood as an example of 'social realism', art that comments on contemporary social, political, or economic conditions in a realistic manner. Her paintings made visible, the often unrecognized work of a woman caring for her children, her husband, and their home. Because of this close lens, she applied to her daily life, Pratt became a hero to women across the country. She was a woman succeeding in a field dominated by men, while also raising a family. Meanwhile, her subject matter, the cooking, the cleaning illustrated, the uneven workload women bore at home.
(06:55):
Though this housework gap has narrowed since the 1960s, it's a problem that persists. One nationwide survey found that on average, Canadian women still do over 50% more unpaid work around the house than men, which may explain why Pratt's depictions of these small everyday moments carry such tremendous power even today. And why beneath the beauty on their surface, you may feel a slight barb.
Uju (07:21):
This is what it meant to have and maintain a household. It meant making the bed. It meant preparing dinner and tidying up after dinner. It meant canning in the fall and preserving right.
Andre (07:31):
Maybe there's more to this. Maybe she might be talking about something being caged in those jars.
Christian (07:39):
Ordinary people are doing meaningful things every day of their lives. It's the memory of how much work and care went into making these things that are sitting on the shelf.
Narrator (07:52):
Pratt considered a dish full of jelly one of the most beautiful things she could look at. The fascination began in childhood when her mother would keep jars of jelly on the kitchen window sill. They reminded her of the stained glass at church — an almost divine sort of beauty. But as Pratt began making jelly herself, she understood that they weren't only beautiful, but that they required a lot of work too. Jellies came to represent both joy and sacrifice for Pratt captured together in a jar.
(08:23):
Pratt once said her only strength was finding something where most people would find nothing. She made an extraordinary art practice from looking and thinking closely about the ordinary things that passed through her hands every day. The fish she prepared, the bread she baked, the home she had made within those seemingly mundane tasks. She showed us the whole range of human emotions and experiences: joy and suffering, beauty and repulsion, life and death.
Mary Pratt (Artist) (08:51):
Well, I think with my work, even things that are ordinary are not ordinary because I don't really believe that anything's ordinary. I think everything is complex and worthy of conjecture and worthy of a look, worthy of a close look. But I believe that 'just' stuff informed you and that you could imagine the secrets of the universe by looking at a pile of grapes,
Narrator (09:24):
A pile of grapes — or maybe a jar full of jelly.
(09:33):
Join us as we decode Canadian art and understand why looking at art matters.


One of Canada’s most beloved painters shows us that magic is hiding everywhere — even in a jar of jelly. Have a closer look at Jelly Shelf by Mary Pratt.

Mary Pratt – Jelly Shelf

Jelly Shelf

This is Jelly Shelf by Mary Pratt. Created in 1999, it’s one of the best-known works by the beloved Canadian painter — so iconic it was even on a stamp.

Jelly ShelfJelly Shelf

Mary Pratt

What do you see first?

Jelly Shelf