North Saskatchewan Blue, oil on canvas

Our featured artist today is Alberta-based artist Adele Knowler. Adele works in mixed media to create paintings of figures and landscapes that have a controlled yet casual air about them.

Hudson's Bay Series - Big Lake, oil on canvas

The work currently available on Adele’s website seems uniformly thematic – figures and faces that appear prominently in one series are seemingly echoed or referenced in the next. Adele’s landscapes are very quiet, and she tends to paint scenery without much trees varied lines. I’m rather fond of how clean these landscapes seem. Still bodies of water, far off fields and never-ending prairie horizons are common themes.

Adele's Birds of a Feather series on her website


Birds of a Feather #7 Blue Pashmina, oil, 18K gold ink and multimedia on birchwood 

In her figurative work, particularly in her series Birds of a Feather she seems to draw from classical Greek influences, with studies featuring classical statues and flowing white fabrics. Modern figures appear dressed in robes and with golden wreaths around their heads. In some cases, Adele even uses real gold ink to accentuate these elements.