Wynona Mulcaster. Prairie Riot, 1988. 91.5 x 120 cm. acrylic on boardEmma Lake was a northern Saskatchewan artists workshop started in 1934 by an immigrant English landscape painter, Gus Kenderdine and the art school at the University of Saskatchewan. When one thinks of how dire prairie circumstances were in the 1930s it was a truly civilised act. Originally meant to train Saskatchewan teachers to teach art, it was a camp: tents and a dining hall at the next door Anglican Church summer camp.
After WWII, the romanticism of Kenderdine was superseded by a more vigorous Saskatchewan school consisting of what became the Regina Five: Kenneth Lochhead, Arthur McKay, Ronald Bloore, Ted Godwin, Morton, several US artists and Roy Kiyooka. In 1955 Lochhead re-initiated the Emma Lake Artists' Workshop, bringing in an interesting list of modern abstractionists, often from New York, and famously, Clement Greenberg, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland and Anthony Caro.
The effect of these powerful proponents of colour field painting, abstract expressionism and general postwar surface exploration and mark-making on the romantic landscape tradition of Saskatchewan has produced a long generation of artists that see landscape in the most interesting ways.
Wynona Mulcaster uses acrylic like water colour in 'Prairie Riot' of 1988. Mulcaster, born in 1915, had been one of the early Emma Lake participants, a teacher with a wartime BA from the University of Saskatchewan and discussed in Clement Greenberg's 'View of art of the prairies', 1963.
Prairie fields as, literally, a field of marks is also found in the work of Reta Cowley, Dorothy Knowles and, bringing us up to a young generation of Saskatchewan painters, Rebecca Perehudoff. It is a way of registering the detail of the landscape without painting the details.