Reta Cowley, Terry Fenton and Dorothy Knowles Prairie Painters: Light and Pattern
Reception: Saturday, January 28th, 2-4pm
January 28 - February 16, 2012
Art Placement is pleased to present this exhibition of three of our best known landscape painters: Reta Cowley, Terry Fenton and Dorothy Knowles. This exhibition explores the connections between each artist from Cowley's exquisitely structured brushstrokes and delicate nuances of value to Fenton's classically balanced horizon line and expansive space to Knowles' consumate paintings that capture an absolute "sense of place" in the soul of the viewer.

Exhibition installation images:

"Prairie Painters: Light and Pattern" by Terry Fenton

Reta Cowley came first and helped to pave the way. Reta taught and was befriended by Dorothy Knowles; both became accomplished and original artists, among the best in Canada. I, in turn, learned from and was befriended by both. I'm delighted and humbled to share this exhibition with them.

We're all landscape painters for the most part - Landscape painters in an era dominated by abstraction. Watercolour painting influenced all three of us. We were all vitally connected with Emma Lake.

Trained as a schoolteacher, Reta Cowley was a late starter. She discovered painting in 1937 at the age of 27 in an Emma Lake summer class taught by Augustus Kenderdine. During her summer break in the war years she studied at the Banff School under the accomplished British watercolour painter, W. J. Phillips - instead of the more famously "Canadian" and widely influential A. Y. Jackson. After the war she moved to Saskatoon from Yorkton, took evening classes in art at the University, and there discovered French and American modernism through the watercolours of the American, John Marin. By the 1950s she'd absorbed Cezanne and had become an artist of substance. But she didn't settle for that initial accomplishment. She developed steadily in strength and sophistication until illness brought a halt in the early 1990s - over 30 years of steady growth. A remarkable accomplishment!

Cowley was one of the first teachers of Dorothy Knowles in 1948, once again in an Emma Lake summer class. If anything Emma Lake came to mean even more to Dorothy than it meant to Reta. Dorothy returned to Emma Lake - especially to artists' workshops - for several decades thereafter. A major turning point was the workshop led by Clement Greenberg in 1962. Greenberg encouraged her to paint from nature and subsequently acquired one of her paintings. He became a mentor, seeing her in New York from time to time and visiting her studio in Saskatoon on several occasions. (Greenberg admired and recommended Cowley's art as well and came to encourage my own painting and writing.)

I myself met Dorothy at Emma Lake in 1965, at a workshop led by Lawrence Alloway and John Cage. I soon became a friend and admirer. Although she didn't teach me formally, Dorothy and her husband, Bill Perehudoff, encouraged me in my own art when I took it up again seriously in the late 1960s after a hiatus from university and the Regina College art school. I too began with watercolour and the medium and its masters has affected the way I work today with oil paint.

Despite these similarities, our approaches differ. Reta stuck primarily to watercolour painting throughout her life. She always painted directly from nature, turning to small oils only when weather forced her to paint inside her car. Dorothy has always painted watercolours but has worked primarily in oils and acrylic both on the spot and in studio. She has the rare ability to paint convincingly on a large scale, often with subdued colour. Her studio paintings, especially, are often charcoals with wash-like vastly enlarged watercolours. At best they're among the supreme achievements of Canadian art.

Our choice of subjects also differs. Reta focused almost exclusively on the parkland north of Saskatoon. Although Dorothy's subjects are varied (among her other achievements, I believe her to be Canada's best ever painter of mountain subjects) but there's often an undercurrent of river valleys, notably the North Saskatchewan near the Perehudoff farm property west of Saskatoon. Perhaps because I was born in Regina my work inclines to the open prairie with its vast and varied skies. My paintings tend to use colour to suggest light.

Terry Fenton
January 19, 2012