Jonathan Knowlton

Jonathan Knowlton was born in New York in 1937. A painter and printmaker, he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Yale University in 1960 and his Master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. After graduating, he was awarded a Fullbright grant to study printmaking in Paris, where he also studied at Atelier 17 with the British printmaker Stanley William Hayter. In 1966 he established the printmaking department at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and went on to teach there until his retirement in 2002. From 1970-71, he studied sculpture in Florence, Italy under a Canada Council grant.

As an educator, Jonathan Knowlton was very highly regarded by his students and his peers at the University of Alberta. He was also well-known as an artist, primarily for his oil and watercolor paintings – although he worked in other media as well – and he explored a variety of styles, from photographic representation to hard-edged abstraction. His artworks were included in a great number of exhibitions and he is represented in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the University of California Berkeley Art Museum, the University of Alberta Art Gallery, the Edmonton Art Gallery, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Petro-Canada, Syncrude and Imperial Oil collections.