Artists are not always content to let their art speak for them. Some, like Newfoundland painter Mary Pratt, choose to stack prose up against their paintings, providing another piece to the puzzle that is their work. A Personal Calligraphy contains a few previously published articles and the texts of various speechs, but the book consists mainly of 30 years of Pratt’s journal excerpts.

Pratt is one of this country’s most celebrated artists, but anyone looking for lengthy discussions of technique or for the painter’s philosophy of art will be disappointed. Though the book contains many full-colour reproductions of her paintings, Pratt’s writing focuses on her childhood in Fredericton, her own children’s lives, and the day-to-day chores that have shaped her life.

Pratt is known primarily as a painter of domestic subjects, and the day-to-day is her stock in trade. In 1975 Robert Fulford wrote that she was a “visual poet of the kitchen” – too glib a description, but one containing a kernel of truth. Her journal entries are laced with moments where she has been struck by the beauty of the things around her: crisply ironed shirts, rumpled sheets, sunlight on jelly jars. The writing is intimate, her style brisk and conversational.

A Personal Calligraphy offers glimpses at the woman behind the art. Pratt doesn’t attempt to explain what her art means, but her words reveal more than the reader could have known to ask. “Perhaps the only place I can be what I want to be is in my journals and my letters,” she writes in her introduction. Neither a thematically linked essay collection nor a traditional memoir, this book of pictures and essays is a multi-faceted, deliberately fragmentary, and thoroughly engaging self-portrait.