Dorothy Knowles

Dorothy Knowles was one of Canada’s most celebrated landscape painters, renowned for luminous canvases that revealed the quiet grandeur of the prairies. Raised on a farm near Unity, Saskatchewan, she found her direction at the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops, where in 1962 the influential American critic Clement Greenberg encouraged her to make nature the focus of her work — advice that shaped a remarkable six-decade career. Her paintings combine the traditional values of landscape with the innovation of Post-Painterly Abstraction, and her works are held in major collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

Working from her van as a mobile studio, Knowles painted outdoors, capturing the wide expanses of Saskatchewan’s prairies and airy skies in a way few artists have matched. Terry Fenton, former director of the Edmonton and Mendel art galleries, declared that she had grown in stature as one of the most important Canadian painters since Emily Carr. She was inducted into the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 1987, became a Member of the Order of Canada in 2004, and in 2006 Canada Post issued two stamps featuring her paintings — a fitting tribute to an artist whose vision became inseparable from the Canadian prairie itself.