Deserts

“My current style is the culmination of a lifetime of research. I have worked for fifty years to be able to draw as I do now. I would like to succeed, someday, in telling it all with one simple drawn line,” Pratt used to say.

Pratt’s passion for the line pushed him to aim for the essential. The desert had become for him the ideal setting for this personal research. Indeed, what could be more difficult for an illustrator than to make the line of the horizon come alive? Perhaps it is here, in certain images of “The Scorpions of the Desert,” or of “The Man of Somalia,” that the magic of Pratt’s stroke works in the most surprising way.