Dorothy Knowles (courtesy The Gallery/Art Placement)
The great Prairie landscape artist Dorothy Knowles, a leading light in the Saskatchewan art scene for generations, has died.
Saskatoon's Art Placement gallery announced the news today, saying Knowles died May 16 in Saskatoon. She was 96.
"Her tremendous talent has been recognized and appreciated by all – everyone from critics, curators and other art world insiders to the general public at large," the gallery said in an online announcement. "In a Canadian art world replete with landscape painters, Dorothy Knowles' contribution stands apart, achieving a level of excellence and success few have attained."
Best known for her paintings of the prairies, although she painted across Canada, Knowles is remarkable for her observational sensitivity, informed by both the British watercolour tradition and the formal rigour of modernist abstraction, the gallery said.
"Her work consistently demonstrates the extraordinary facility she had with drawing. Her line is unmistakable, fluid and confident, it dances across the surfaces of her pictures with a fluttering lightness. Her lines and marks create structure while also conveying energy and a sense of movement. Her pictures often seem to rustle and sway, tall grasses and leaves agitated by some breeze, unseen, yet somehow perceptible."
Knowles, born in Unity, a town west of Saskatoon, grew up on a farm. She went to the University of Saskatchewan intending to become a lab technician, but decided to follow her heart after spending a summer at Emma Lake, north of Prince Albert, where the university ran an art school in the woods.
She studied art at night school and summer school in Saskatoon and briefly in London at the Goldsmith School of Art. She had a debut show at the Saskatoon Art Centre in 1954, but a turning point came at an Emma Lake workshop in 1962, when American critic Clement Greenberg encouraged her to pursue painting from nature regardless of the era's interest in abstraction.
Over the years, she was a frequent participant and leader at Emma Lake workshops, while continuing to paint prolifically in watercolour, acrylic and oil.
She was the widow of William Perehudoff, an artist associated with the colour field movement. They married in 1953 at the British embassy in Paris. He died in 2013, aged 94. The couple raised three daughters.
Knowles was inducted into the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 1987, and became a Member of the Order of Canada in 2004. She was also a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
Two postage stamps that depicted 1971 paintings by Knowles, The Field of Rapeseed and North Saskatchewan River were issued by Canada Post in 2006.