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Prairie portraits
Dorothy Knowles has spent her life trying to capture the awe and wonder of the great Saskatchewan prairie in paintings, sometimes using canvases as big as six by eight feet. In fact, if you look at one of Knowles’ enormous paintings, you can almost believe that she took a complete prairie landscape and dropped it, in its entirety, onto her canvas. Her paintings show big skies, rolling clouds and vast fields alive with prairie colours that you might not find anywhere else in the world.
Knowles was a farm girl who grew up in Unity, Saskatchewan. She studied science
at university, but only after attending art classes one summer did she decide to make painting her life’s work. She soon became a familiar sight, travelling in a van through the farmlands of her home province, painting the landscape she loves. Her art is widely admired, and she was awarded the Order of Canada for her achievements in 2004.
This year, Canada Post honours the work
of Dorothy Knowles with two new stamps in its ongoing Art Canada series. On the domestic rate (51¢) stamp, you can almost feel the warm summer sun in her watercolour painting “The Field of Rapeseed.” On the U.S. rate (89¢) stamp, you can sense the cool, reflecting blue water in her oil painting “North Saskatchewan River.” |
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