Dorothy Knowles’s Big Sky brings six decades of Saskatchewan landscapes to Toronto

Dorothy Knowles’s Summer Day (1984). The Saskatchewan painter’s work is the subject of Big Sky, on view at Toronto’s Rukaj Gallery through November 5, 2026.

Photo credit: Dorothy Knowles / Courtesy of Rukaj Gallery. Credit wording subject to gallery confirmation.

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Works spanning nearly six decades by Saskatchewan painter Dorothy Knowles are on display at Toronto’s Rukaj Gallery in Big Sky, a survey exhibition running from October 8 to November 5. The show brings together work dated from 1963 to 2021, including paintings, watercolours and rarely exhibited charcoal drawings, alongside the first volume of a new two-part monograph on the artist.

Knowles, who died in 2023, was one of Canada’s best-known landscape painters. Born in Unity, Saskatchewan, in 1927, she studied at the University of Saskatchewan, graduating with a bachelor of arts in 1948 after initially pursuing biology. That same year, a friend encouraged her to attend a summer art course at Emma Lake, beginning an association with the workshops and the surrounding landscape that continued throughout her career.

A later Emma Lake workshop became another important point in her career. Rukaj Gallery reports that visiting American critic Clement Greenberg encouraged Knowles in 1962 to move away from abstraction and concentrate on landscape. The gallery describes her subsequent paintings as retaining elements of abstract composition and colour even as she devoted herself to the places around her.

The Toronto exhibition covers much of that development. Among the works identified by the gallery are Lake Through Trees (1963), Reflected Clouds (1964), Big Sky (1984), The River (1986) and River in May (2017). Its date range extends into 2021, the later years of a practice that lasted approximately seven decades.

The accompanying hardcover publication concentrates on Knowles’s works on paper, with an essay by Saskatchewan painter Robert Christie, a longtime friend. Christie was born in Saskatoon, studied at the University of Saskatchewan and participated in the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops. Rukaj Gallery says the publication is the first instalment of a planned two-volume monograph; a second volume, examining Knowles’s paintings, is expected in 2027.

In the gallery’s exhibition announcement, Christie recalls that when other painters found a view and set up their easels, Knowles might turn hers around to paint what was behind them. He uses the anecdote to describe her interest in overlooked subjects, including the view other painters had left at their backs.

Knowles and her husband, abstract painter William Perehudoff, were closely involved with Saskatchewan’s art community and the Emma Lake workshops. They purchased a cottage at Emma Lake in 1969 and established studios there. The University of Saskatchewan, which mounted its own Knowles exhibition in 2023, has documented how the area’s woods and waterways became recurring subjects in her work.

Remai Modern holds work by Knowles in its collection. She received the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 1987 and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2004.

Big Sky is at Rukaj Gallery, 384 Eglinton Avenue West, Toronto, through November 5, 2026. The gallery lists regular hours as Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

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