Image of Gus Kenderdine seated in front of tent at the first camp at Emma Lake.

Bio/Historical Note: Artist workshops have been held at Emma Lake, Saskatchewan, since 1935. Augustus F. (Gus) Kenderdine, an artist trained at the Academie Julian in Paris and an instructor in the fledgling Department of Art at the University of Saskatchewan, established a summer art camp on an eleven-acre boreal forest peninsula on the shores of Emma Lake. He convinced Walter C. Murray, first president of the University of Saskatchewan, that the art camp could perform a vital role in the offerings of the department, and in 1936 the Murray Point Art School at Emma Lake was officially incorporated as a summer school program. The school was also known as the art colony. Participants were teachers and artists who came from all over the province to learn how to teach art in Saskatchewan schools. After Kenderdine's death in 1947, a new generation of Saskatchewan artists came of age or moved into the province, including Kenneth Lochhead, Arthur McKay, Ronald Bloore, Ted Godwin, and Douglas Morton, popularly referred to as the Regina Five. In 1955 Lochhead, director of the Regina College School of Art, proposed a two-week workshop at Emma Lake to follow the Murray Point Art School classes. The workshop concept, based on modernist art, was established to keep Prairie artists in touch with art centers such as New York and Toronto. The internationally renowned Emma Lake Artists' Workshops became an established annual event and continued virtually unchanged until the last workshop was held in 1995. Since the mid-1960s the site has also been a provincial research area under the auspices of the U of S Department of Biology for biologists and other researchers. It is the most northerly field station in Saskatchewan and one of the few sites in Canada that specifically examines the boreal forest. It was declared as a game preserve in 1962. In 1989 the site was officially designated as Emma Lake Kenderdine Campus in recognition of Gus Kenderdine. The campus closed in 2012. In 2020 the university relocated nearly two dozen cabins at the site to Montreal Lake Cree Nation to provide additional housing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bio/Historical Note: Augustus (Gus) Frederick Lafosse Kenderdine was born 31 March 1870 in Chorlton-upon-Medlock, England. He studied art under his grandfather, Belgian artist Chevalier de la Fosse, at the Manchester School of Art, and was then apprenticed to several established artists in Blackpool. Kenderdine went on to study at the Academie Julien, in Paris, France, in 1891. Upon returning to England he opened Gus Kenderdine Photographer and Fine Art Dealer, but chose to emigrate to western Canada, inspired by the stories of the Barr Colonists and their utopian settlement of Brittania. The family homesteaded near Lashburn (1908-1920) and he fell in love with the beauty of northern Saskatchewan. At the request of Walter C. Murray, University of Saskatchewan president, Kenderdine opened a studio in Saskatoon in 1920 and began teaching art classes. Murray offered Kenderdine artist-in-residency status on campus, and in 1927 appointed Kenderdine lecturer in Art, teaching noncredit classes. In the early 1930s Kenderdine purchased land at Murray Point on Emma Lake, a site which became the University of Saskatchewan Summer Art School, of which he was director from 1936-1947. Fondly remembered by his students, "Father" Kenderdine, as he was referred to in the yearbooks, made a significant contribution to the interest and appreciation of art in Saskatchewan. In 1936 he also became director of the School of Fine Arts at Regina College. Kenderdine did several portrait commissions and later exhibited his work across Canada, although he is best known in Saskatchewan. He did several landscape studies in charcoal in a style similar to Gainsborough. Kenderdine’s sweeping romantic depictions of the Saskatchewan landscape are marked by his training in England and France. His imagery recast Saskatchewan's topography in the comforting image of Europe. Kenderdine died 3 August 1947 while teaching at Emma Lake, and is buried at Lashburn Cemetery. The Art School at Emma Lake was renamed the Kenderdine Campus in his honour. In 1991 the U of S named the Kenderdine Art Gallery in his honour, thanks to a bequest by his daughter, May Beamish (1898-1998). His works can be seen in the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Kenderdine Road in Arbor Creek in Saskatoon honours him.