DOROTHY KNOWLES "Landmarks" at Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery

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"The Pool"

Dorothy Knowles, "The Pool," 1968, oil and charcoal on canvas. Mendel Art Gallery Collection.

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"Summer View"

Dorothy Knowles, "Summer View," 1988, oil on canvas. Private collection.

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"The Pool"

Dorothy Knowles, "The Pool," 1968, oil and charcoal on canvas. Mendel Art Gallery Collection.

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"Landmarks"

Dorothy Knowles, "Landmarks," installation view, Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery.

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DOROTHY KNOWLES, Landmarks

Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery

By Patricia Robertson

Saskatchewan landscape artist Dorothy Knowles is a Canadian icon — possibly the Emily Carr of the Back 40, or Saskatchewan’s lost member of the Group of Seven. So any exhibition of her work is an event, and the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery’s recent display of her paintings, Landmarks, offers an informed and evocative overview of Knowles’ exemplary body of work.

Curated by fellow landscape painter Terry Fenton, this exhibition opens with a Self Portrait (1956) of the artist in a blue top wearing a solemn expression. Her direct gaze at the viewer is reminiscent of a similar introductory self-portrait of Emily Carr that curator Doris Shadbolt used in the Carr retrospective at The National Gallery in the summer of 1990. Although unremarkable as a self-portrait, it does give the viewer a sense of Knowles’ stoic and determined character, with her direct gaze and set chin.

At first glance, the artist’s humble natural subject matter and Zen palette can be underestimated. But like Carr, she often worked outdoors in a portable studio, and she radically chose to document her own backyard, seeing nature as worthy subject matter in a time when abstract art was quickly gaining ground. Knowles’ favourite subjects — the lush river valleys of her rural childhood — are depicted with reverence and glee.

Born in 1927 in Unity, Saskatchewan, the painter grew up on a farm with a valley view. She studied biology at the University of Saskatchewan and was introduced to painting at a summer workshop at the famous Emma Lake Artists’ Workshop in 1948 — a critical locale for the development of her work that she re-visited throughout her career. An informative companion documentary, Between the North Pole and New York City (2004) provides an overview of the history of Emma Lake and explores Knowles’ connection to New York art critic Clement Greenberg.

After Emma Lake, Knowles studied in England at the Goldsmith School of Art in London. Like Carr, she found London dark and dreary. In 1953, she married Saskatoon painter Bill Perehudoff in Paris and they returned to Saskatoon. They each set up studios in their tiny house and Knowles toiled away in the basement while her husband constructed his own studio attached to the garage.

Knowles preferred to work outdoors, and evocative paintings like The Edge of the Lake (1965) have a lovely immediacy. The subtle green and gold and brown hues are captivating. The layers of colour and texture meld perfectly in a vibrant and dynamic depiction of Emma Lake. The Pool (1968) is an oil and charcoal rendition of water reflecting back the scrubby bush and trees with the hot prairie palettes of gold, brown and green. The delicate, almost grey-white, rendering of the sky above lets the dramatic groundscape dominate the piece.

I was less enamoured with some of the watercolours presented in the exhibition — I much prefer Knowles’ vivacious oil and acrylic paintings. The Bow River(1981) is a pretty but lackluster watercolour, missing the rich, textured dynamism of The Pool andOctober Colours (2002). View in Winter (2006) is a more recent work evoking the stoic winter landscape with marvelous dexterity —bare branches of frozen trees with their ashen colours, the scattered snow with prairie peeking through and the hint of blue in the near-frozen water of the river trickling along despite the cold.

As a fellow flatlander, I’m most drawn to Knowles’ accurate and delicate prairie landscapes. There’s something deeply comforting and uplifting about the vast and intricate Big Empty as she portrays it, an eloquently rendered Saskatchewan.

Curator Terry Fenton has just published a comprehensive catalogue for Landmarks: The Art of Dorothy Knowles by Hagios Press, Regina.