Big Sky: Dorothy Knowles

Opening October 8th through November 5, 2026, Rukaj Gallery presents Big Sky, an exhibition of paintings by Saskatchewan painter Dorothy Knowles (1927-2023) made between the years 1963 to 2021. These works, including watercolour, paintings, and the rare appearance of charcoal drawings, display Knowles’s strong sense of space, temperature, light, and line. Alongside the exhibition, a hardcover monograph on Knowles’s work on paper will be released, featuring an essay by her longtime friend, the painter Robert Christie, who has written extensively about painting, Saskatchewan, and being an artist. The book is the first part of a two part comprehensive monograph, the second book will be released in 2027 and focus on Knowles’s painting practice. "Dorothy imprinted the character of the day on her work. It wasn’t just a sense of space, it was a sense of being there," Christie explains about Knowles’s uncanny ability to paint the air. “Is the air warm, cool, is there a breeze, can you smell the trees? She put the viewer right beside her,” he continues.  Knowles was born in 1927 in Unity, Saskatchewan, a small farming town. She moved to Saskatoon in her early twenties to attend university, where she joined the city’s growing arts community and met the painter William Perehudoff, whom she later married. The couple were central to the art community in the Prairies, hosting visiting critics and were closely involved in the influential Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops. During one session at Emma Lake in 1962, the visiting critic Clement Greenberg encouraged Knowles to move away from abstraction and towards landscapes. Knowles heeded his advice, yet kept a spirit of abstraction within her canvases. Within her representational depictions of the Canadian landscape, a strong sense of composition, line, and colour remains, resembling the colour field painting popular in the post-war period.  "When she went out painting with other landscape painters, they'd find a nice spot and set up their easels,” explains Christie. “Dorothy would literally turn her easel around and paint whatever was behind them. She wasn't looking for the spectacular or the ready-made image."  This lens set Knowles apart from her contemporaries and helped her endure, despite the many hurdles of the 20th-century art world dominated by men. Knowles saw the world differently, turning her gaze away from the status quo to depict the quieter, harder-to-grasp aspects of the world around her.

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Tatum Dooley
Founder, Art Forecast
tatum@artforecast.info