The medium leaves no room for error, no room for blending or layering. Each brushstroke has to be deliberate and painstaking, while looking like the execution was neither.
Watercolours adorn the walls of the Humboldt and District Museum and Gallery (HDMG) right now. The artwork of Dorothy Knowles, one of Canada's most noted landscape artists went up on February 1, and will be up in the museum's gallery until February 23.
The works in the exhibition, entitled "Dorothy Knowles: Prairie Pictures" are part of the permanent collection of the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery. The show was organized and curated by Heather Smith of that institution.
It's touring the province as part of the Organization of Saskatchewan Arts Council's Arts on the Move program.
Knowles has been painting in Saskatchewan since 1948 and has achieved Canada's highest levels of recognition. Although she had reached her mature painting style by the late 1960s, she continues to evolve.
Her works distill the prairie landscape down to the basics- grasses, trees, light and sky - in a light-handed way that shows the artist has mastered the difficult medium of the watercolour.
According to Smith, "she is perhaps nowhere more bold in her landscape experiments than when she is working in watercolour because it is so quick, colourful, light to travel with and endlessly variable."
Knowles' paintings show that she experiments with confidence, Smith added, challenging herself with the unfamiliar in order to create the suggestion of a landscape that would be provocative and enticing to the viewer.
A prolific painter, Knowles never tires of painting the places she is familiar with in nature, Smith claims.
Familiar subjects in her work include the Saskatchewan River valleys and the Qu'Appelle Valley. There are also views from the shore of Emma Lake, where her family has a cottage, and mountain views, the result of camping trips she has made to the mountains.
"Dorothy Knowles continues to paint on a high level.... (and) to many artists in the Canadian West, she has been and remains an inspiration and an example... There is something inescapably original about her vision," said Terry Fenton, who wrote about her work in a book called "Land Marks: The Art of Dorothy Knowles," published in 2008.
The exhibit has been touring Saskatchewan since April 2011, and will wrap up its trip around the province in April of this year.
It was brought to Humboldt by Conexus and the Humboldt and Area Arts Council.
