Vendu pour : $12,500

PROVENANCE
Waddington Galleries, Toronto
Beckett Gallery Limited, Hamilton
Sold sale of Fine Canadian Art, Joyner / Waddington's, May 30, 2006, lot 42
Private Collection, Toronto

Dorothy Knowles grew up on a farm, and was studying biology to become a laboratory technologist when she enrolled in a summer art course at Emma Lake in 1948. It was here, led by Saskatoon artist Reta Cowley and James Frederick Finley from the Ontario College of Art, that Knowles was inspired to pursue painting as a career. She went on to study art at the University of Saskatchewan, the Banff School of Fine Arts, and in 1951, at the Goldsmith School of Art in London, England. She traveled to Europe with her husband and fellow artist William Perehudoff, but it was at Emma Lake in Saskatoon where she had a crucial artistic breakthrough. At a workshop there in 1962, she met the American art critic Clement Greenberg. He encouraged her to continue painting landscapes rather than pursue abstraction, the dominant artistic approach at the time. However, in the decades that followed, she continued to make landscape paintings which never relinquished a connection to the language of abstraction.

Influenced by the Impressionists, English watercolourists, as well as the post-painterly abstractionism of her contemporaries, Knowles is recognized for her extraordinary ability to capture the uniquely Canadian landscapes of her Saskatoon home. Her paintings often appear dramatically sparse, with open fields and faraway horizons giving an immediate sense of space and distance. She covers her canvases with light washes and intricate, soft brush marks in a muted palette of diluted, transparent, pastel paint. These brush marks are often supported by charcoal outlines left over from the underdrawing. The charcoal marks emerge through the paint, breaking through the blended fields and washes, and they hold their own presence. In Reflections, the brush marks weave together moments of pure abstraction, with streaks, blobs and splatters that effortlessly pool back together into renderings of foliage, mountains or clouds. Close up, these marks are individualized; tracks of paint that are available for our scrutiny, much like on a microscopic slide. Her marks are subtle yet evocative, invoked with a knowledge of the medium as much as the subject matter. She is fully engrossed with, and invested in, the landscape of the prairies, which she treats with great care.

Knowles has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Seventh Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Painting at the National Gallery of Canada (1968) and in the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden exhibit 14 Canadians: A Critic’s Choice (1977). Her work is in many public collections, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Mendel Art Gallery, Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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