Dorothy Knowles Canadian, b. 1927

Dorothy Knowles is without a doubt one of Canada’s most extraordinary landscape artists. Born in 1927 in Saskatoon, Knowles studied at the University of Saskatchewan. The turning point of her career came when she began attending (and became heavily involved with) the famous Emma Lake workshops in the 1950s, along with her husband and fellow artist William Perehudoff. In the early 60s these workshops led Knowles to meet famed art critic Clement Greenberg, who encouraged her to paint nature and landscapes rather than to pursue abstract painting. Her major influences consist of the Post-Painterly Abstraction of the 1960s-70s, Impressionism, and English water color traditions. While her paintings are primarily representational, Knowles’ work has an element of abstraction that is often overlooked due to the nature of her work and the subtlety with which she expresses her influences. Her signature style consists of big, airy skies, sometimes full of clouds, and grasslands in the foreground, showcasing the intimate details of the prairies of Western Canada. Her unique approach to art wasn’t just a matter of thinned down paint — the diluted acrylic of her early years and subsequently oil paint interacted with a network of charcoal drawings. Her paintings resemble watercolours in a superficial sense. Her charcoal drawings not only arrange the elements of landscape in space, but also create a web-like network that holds the picture surface together.

Throughout her career, Knowles has exhibited in established galleries and museums (including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto) and several touring exhibitions to regional museums across Canada. She was the subject of a recent exhibition at the Remai Modern Art Museum in Saskatoon, SK from the 31st of August to the 20th of January, 2019.

The list of major corporate and public collections that hold her works is extensive, including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal; Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon; Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton; the Boston Museum, Boston; and others. Knowles has also amassed a variety of honors and awards, including being selected for a Canada Postage Stamp in 1987, becoming a member of the Order of Canada in 2004, and receiving the Centennial Medal of Saskatchewan just a year later. As the former director of the Edmonton and Mendel Art Gallery, Terry Fenton, said: “she had grown in a stature as one of the most important Canadian painters since Emily Carr.”