Artist Info
Dorothy Knowles
one of Canada’s most prominent landscape painters, a recipient of the Order of Canada, the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, Honorary Doctor of Laws University of Regina, the Senate of Canada Sesquicentennial Medal, and the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal, Dorothy Knowles was born in Unity, Saskatchewan in 1927.
She grew up on a farm with her parents and three older brothers, Paulden, Robert and Douglas during the Depression. It was a happy way of life mostly spent outdoors including going to get the cows on her bicycle, often with her cat riding on her shoulder. Her attachment to the natural environment would inspire her throughout her long art career, which began in 1948 after taking an art class at the Kenderdine Campus at Emma Lake in Northern Saskatchewan, which would be a big part of her life for decades to come.
As is widely known, it was where the influential New York art critic Clement Greenberg encouraged her to keep painting from nature regardless of the contemporary predominance of abstraction. It is also where composer John Cage asked her if she was “the one painting those beautiful landscapes.”
Following a Bachelor of Arts in Science at the U of S in Saskatoon, and becoming a registered laboratory technologist, Dorothy briefly attended Goldsmiths School of Art in London, England, before marrying the celebrated Canadian Colour Field artist William Perehudoff in Paris in 1951. When they returned to the prairies, they raised three daughters, exhibited their work nationally, internationally and were a key part of the arts community.
Dorothy studied many artists such as Raphael, Monet and Pissarro, though her own work always came back to her Canadian roots. The landscape revealed itself to her in a unique way and she was able to coax this vision out from the soil and sky onto the canvas, whether it was the fierce strength of the mountains, the fall colours in Quebec, or of course, the fields, river valleys and boreal forest of Saskatchewan.
An avid gardener and voracious consumer of novels, Dorothy was happiest on painting trips to the Rockies with her family and close friends, or out in the fields battling mosquitos and strong wind to capture a particular light or swiftly-moving cloud.
