Landmarks: The Art of Dorothy Knowles
Hagios Press / 10 September 2008

Landmarks: The Art of Dorothy Knowles Text by Terry Fenton, Art by Dorothy Knowles Published by Hagios Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $25.95 ISBN 978-0-9783440-2-3 If members of the general public were asked to name a prominent Canadian landscape painter, I’d guess that they might identify a member of the Group of Seven or Emily Carr, but here in Saskatchewan we also have a number of landscape painters of prominence, and high on the list is Dorothy Knowles. Terry Fenton, acclaimed landscape painter and former Mendel Art Gallery director, has forged an aptly-named homage to his friend and fellow artist, Saskatoon’s Dorothy Knowles, and Hagios has packaged the text and forty stunning Knowles’ images in a book that one might expect to pay twice as much for. Land Marks: The Art of Dorothy Knowles is a tour de force. Fenton met his subject at an Emma Lake Artists Workshop in 1965, where another artist commented: “That housewife from Saskatoon is making good paintings.” Not surprisingly, the famous Emma Lake workshops (initiated in 1933 by Walter Murray and Augustus Kenderdine) played an integral role in Knowles’ life and work. It was here that she “discovered a passion for art that…