Patricia Canelake

PATRICIA CANELAKE (1951 – Present) lives and works in Knife River, Minnesota, near the North Shore of Lake Superior. For fifteen years she taught Media Arts in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has worked as an adjunct instructor in Northern Minnesota. Her artist residencies included Yaddo Artist Colony, MacDowell Artist Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, and I-Park Artist’s Sanctuary. Canelake has previously served as a panelist for the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and as a juror for The Minnesota Arts Board.

Her style of painting portrays a balance between storytelling and the rough elegance of form and color. Simple figurative and animal subjects, leashed and unleashed, are the focus of her work. Canelake’s art has been described as having “an aesthetic of attraction—both obvious and mysterious.” She and her paintings are interested in pushing and pulling, and this theme is ever-present in her work. It can be with ahorse and bridle, the swaying dress, and that greatest of pushers and pullers, the sea. Canelake has also expressed interest in the pushing and pulling of paint across the canvas. She has even said that “the nature of paint is my primary reason to paint.”

Canelake has received numerous awards for her art including two McKnight Foundation Fellowships, a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, The Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Fellowship, and the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council award. Canelake has paintings in permanent collections at the Tweed Museum of Art and the United States Department of the Interior.

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