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Reta Cowley was born on April 1,
1910. Her paintings are renowned for their remarkable
ability to capture the experience of being on the
Saskatchewan prairie, evoking the expanse of space and
depth, of colour found only by a sensitive understanding
of the light of the region. Cowley’s ability to
communicate this breathtaking environment was achieved
through a lifetime dedicated to studying, teaching and
practicing art.
Born Reta Madeline Summers in Moose
Jaw, Cowley spent her childhood years near Truax and in
Yorkton before graduating from the Normal School in
Saskatoon and beginning her teaching career in 1930. She
taught at various rural schools through the difficult
1930s, moving to a permanent job in Yorkton from 1938 to
1946.
Having a lifelong interest in
painting, Cowley began receiving formal training in 1937
when, encouraged by her sister, she attended the
University of Saskatchewan Summer School at Emma Lake,
established the previous year by Augustus Kenderdine. She
returned every summer until 1940, studying art history
under Dr. Gordon Snelgrove and painting with Kenderdine,
from whom she adopted the plein-air tradition of the
Barbizon school (painting from nature on the spot rather
than in the studio). From 1941 through 1944, Cowley spent
her summers at the Banff School of Fine Arts, focusing her
practice on watercolours under the guidance of Walter J.
Phillips. In 1945, she married Fred Cowley and was able to
leave her teaching position and move to Saskatoon. She
attended night classes at the University of Saskatchewan,
studying with Eli Bornstein and Nicolas Bjelajac, and
absorbing the influence of modern art, particularly
Cézanne and John Marin. While Cowley did not share
Bornstein’s ideal of avoiding reference to the natural
world in her paintings, she did gain an understanding of
how to structure her paintings according to form and
colour and develop a patterning in her brush strokes.
By the late 1960s, Cowley’s mature
style had emerged, capturing the space and light of the
landscape in a style informed by modernism. She taught at
the Emma Lake Summer School in the early 1950s (and again
in the mid-1980s), and attended the seminal 1963 workshop
as a participant. She received her Bachelor of Arts from
the University of Saskatchewan in 1966, and served there
as a sessional lecturer until 1972. She continued to teach
public school, retiring in 1975 to paint full-time.
From the 1950s on, Cowley has been
honoured with more than twenty solo exhibitions of her
work and has been in numerous important group exhibitions.
Her work is held in collections across Canada. In 1990,
she received The Saskatchewan Arts Board’s Lifetime Award
for Excellence in the Arts and the Saskatchewan Order of
Merit. Cowley died on November 23, 2004.
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