Pamela Burrill. 'Distant Prospect', 1988. 86 x 119 cm acrylic on canvas.
More on Emma Lake: Pamela Burrill was a geologist, retired by time she painted this in 1988. Really, everyone should paint their environments. According to how one sees a landscape, whether as a geologist, an architect, a gardener, a cook, a plumber, we might start to understand the complexity of land, rather than its instrumentality. I mean, does this look like Saskatchewan of the wheat fields? No, and this perhaps tells us something about how we perceive this country, generally as a set of clichés endlessly reproduced on whatever the equivalent is today of hardware store calendars. As with all our cultural products, there is a handful of well-known artists known across the country, and hundreds of others known only in their own regions, and often only by their own generation.
I find much of the Emma Lake work really startling, incredibly beautiful, very cognisant of contemporary art movements in whatever era the work is from, and almost completely unknown.