Art community mourns passing of famed Saskatchewan artist Dorothy Knowles

One of Canada’s most decorated landscape artists has died.

Dorothy Knowles, who was born in Unity, passed away at the age of 96.

Her daughters, Catherine Perehudoff -Fowler and Rebecca Perehudoff-Minton, confirmed their mother died in hospice care in Saskatoon early Tuesday morning.

Perehudoff-Fowler said her mother was not just an artist, but also their best friend and a mentor.

“She took us out painting when we were young and gave us good materials to work with. We spent many wonderful days out on the prairies and in the mountains alongside each other, painting (and) being outside for hours,” she said.

Knowles’ works were well-known in Canada and around the world.

“Since her debut exhibition at the Saskatoon Art Centre in 1954, 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,” Levi Nicholat, a co-owner of Saskatoon’s The Gallery/Art Placement Inc., said in an emailed statement.

“In a Canadian art world replete with landscape painters, Dorothy Knowles’ contribution stands apart, achieving a level of excellence and success few have attained.”

According to the statement, Knowles studied art in the late 1940s and early 1950s at night school and summer school in Saskatoon and Emma Lake, and also in Banff and in London, England.

During an Emma Lake Artists’ Workshop in 1962, she was encouraged by an American art critic, Clement Greenberg, to make nature the focus of her work.

She subsequently painted the Canadian landscape from coast to coast, but was renowned for her works of the prairies.

“In a landscape that many overlooked as flat and uninteresting, she found boundless inspiration …” Nicholat wrote.

“Few Saskatchewan artists have attained the level of success that Dorothy Knowles had achieved before the age of 50. Despite this early fame, she chose to stay here, to succeed from this place. In doing so, she and her art probably did more to elevate the cultural profile of Saskatchewan than any other artist in this city, before or since.”

Her daughters say their mother was not only a talented landscape artist, but was also accomplished in other areas.

“She actually was a very good portrait painter and figure painter. We have wonderful sketchbooks — drawings of family members and friends. She also grew her garden with painting it in mind. She was kind of composing her flower beds for making art and she was a brilliant still life painter as well,” said Perehudoff-Fowler.

Both daughters recall their mother tending to several gardens during the summertime on old homesteads bought by their father — artist William Perehudoff — but also baking bread and teaching them how to sew.

“She sewed beautiful clothes for us. She sewed whole wardrobes for our Barbie dolls,” recalled Perehudoff-Minton.

Knowles was named to the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 1987 and was invested as a Member of the Order of Canada in 2004.

Two postage stamps featuring paintings by Knowles — The Field of Rapeseed and North Saskatchewan River — were issued by Canada Post in 2006.

“She was a great artist, surely one of the greatest I will ever know, and she produced an astonishing body of work that will live on and be cherished,” Nicholat wrote. “Though she is gone, her art lives on and her legacy lives on through it.”

Perehudoff-Minton said Knowles was lucid and sharp until her death.

“Even up to her last week, she was analyzing art,” Perehudoff-Minton said. “Even at the hospice, we brought in a Reta Cowley that she liked, and she was really looking and studying the art that we brought in.”

A public memorial service will be held for Knowles at Saskatoon Funeral Home on Sunday at 1 p.m.

–Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to correct a misspelling of Cowley’s name.