Old Masters
Craftsmen
Designer
Brian Pratt
In a cramped but orderly loft above his North Fremantle terrace, Old Master designer Brian Pratt stands at the easel he’s used for decades to draw the intricate images that become finely crafted metal and stone. It is here that the most intricate detail of every elaborate piece of art developed by the Old Masters is born.
A De Beers prizewinner, Mr Pratt is 75. As a young man in his native London, he found himself in the advertising business. But mixing paint for graphics wasn’t to his liking. “It wasn’t arty enough.” At age 20, he went to Australia on what was supposed to be a short visit. As a counter assistant at an antique shop, he discovered his ability to remember the dates of jewellery from their hallmarks.
The design process flows from the jewel. It’s not about drawing. Then finding the stones. Rather, sourcing extraordinary jewels & embellishing their shape, form, colour, & quality through design.
In Perth in the mid-seventies, he was working for a jeweller who told him “I need a designer.” At last, he found his metier. Over the following decades, clients would channel their desires through his imagination and pen, to produce the designs for thousands of pieces. “Watching their faces as they opened the case for the first time was the ultimate thing,” he says.
Now, as an Old Master designer, he is free even from the restrictions of time and client requirements. Now, within the production limits of metallurgy and precious stones, his imagination is unfettered.
The genesis of the bespoke piece that accompanies this book comes from here; the imagination and pen of an Old Master, in a small upstairs loft in a port city far away.
As Old Masters, we are technically uninhibited & free of all external parameters. We simply design and craft the ultimate masterpieces, sparing absolutely no cost.