Dorothy Knowles: Saskatchewan Artist

The Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon is currently showing an exhibit of Dorothy Knowles’ landscape paintings. Dorothy Knowles was born in Unity and has lived in Saskatchewan all her life. Her paintings capture the beauty of the Prairie landscape – curving rivers, shrubby knolls, waving grasses.

I love the Prairies, and I think their beauty is often overlooked. This is not the cosy beauty on a human scale of an English landscape of small fields, hedges, thatched cottages and church steeples. The individual is swallowed up by the sheer enormity of the Prairie sky and fields that stretch to the horizon in all directions. And yet, disappearing into nature is very liberating. There is a sense of unity and of room to stretch and grow.

And, if you take the time to look, there are all sorts of flowers blooming close to the earth, beavers on the riverbank and deer in the fields. Saskatchewan is a good place to live – despite the winters!

Note: Quiet Day, a watercolour on paper, is for sale through Art Placement Inc., Saskatoon

Comments

John B. said…
The wide sky of the Prairie is certainly different from the fields and hedges of England, and from the green hills and quiet rivers. Seldom in England are you out of sight of a house or some other person-built structure.

The picture you show catches the feelings you describe.

Flying over the great North American plain reveals the gigantic chequer-board pattern set out byh the surveyors inthe nineteenth century the 1/4 mile sections which will defy the metric system.

Driving over the prairie is indeed not monotonous as I found to my surprise. The land is not dead flat and there are farms, clumps of trees and roadside clutter, even the occasional little town with its grain silo.

I have not though tried the winter.
July 26, 2009 at 4:02 PM
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