Artist Robert Bateman in his home studio on Salt Spring Island, B.C., on June 17.Taylor Roades/The Globe and Mail
Eighty years in the past, Robert Bateman made a gift that would help define his future. He was 12 – everyone called him Bobbie then – and the present was for his mother.
Using a National Geographic black-and-white photo as a reference, he painted an elk, added a birch tree to replicate the tree in their backyard, and as the background drew from a Toronto golf club. He gave it to his mother for Christmas. She loved it. “My mom was always positive and a big supporter,” the artist recalls.
It was the first of countless gifts Bateman, a renowned Canadian nature artist, has made for family and friends in the decades since. Dozens of these items – whimsical drawings, original paintings, furniture for tiny children – make up a new exhibition that has opened at the Victoria gallery that bears his name.
Robert Bateman: Heart and Home includes items such as a birthday card with a painting of hockey player Mike Bossy for son John’s 17th birthday (“my star, my good sport, my greatest sportsman”); a painting of E.T. for son Christopher’s seventh; a little dollhouse-sized painting, made for his sister-in-law Petra, along with a four-panel cartoon drawn on a fax cover sheet for her birthday, sent from Europe. “I feel satisfaction when I make a gift,” Bateman explains. “And who doesn’t like being appreciated?”
Seeing the work of U.S. realist painter Andrew Wyeth at Buffalo’s Albright Knox Gallery in 1962 was a turning point for Bateman.Taylor Roades/The Globe and Mail
Bateman is 92 now and still making gifts for people he loves. Most recently, they have included a harlequin duck painting for his bestfriend Bristol Foster’s 90th birthday, and a pileated woodpecker painting for the April birthday of Loretta Rogers, who died in June.
There have been a few health issues in recent years, including colon cancer last year, from which he has recovered. But when he’s well, Bateman still paints every day. About an hour-and-a-half each morning in the studio, with its high ceilings and windows that open out to endless trees and the lake on Salt Spring Island in B.C., the Batemans share with their neighbour, the conservation group Ducks Unlimited (which is pro-hunting, but there is no hunting on this property). He returns to the studio in the late afternoon before a walk around the property.
“I’m totally happy and contended here. There’s so much variety and things to look at,” Bateman says.
Bateman is a highly skilled, iconic – if not universally beloved – Canadian artist. His primary subject matter (wildlife and the natural world), style (realism) and a controversial decision to get into the photo reproduction business have sullied his name in certain circles.
He winces at the phrase wildlife artist: “I find it demeaning, restrictive and stereotypical,” he wrote in his 2015 memoir, Life Sketches. He has a similar reaction to being called an illustrator. And he has been called worse. Among the critical descriptions that have been levelled at him in the past: “artistic emptiness” and an observation (in a review of a 2007 show by then-Globe and Mail visual art critic Sarah Milroy) that his environmentally themed paintings “have all the sophistication of Reader’s Digest illustrations.”
But there are schools in Canada named for him, and countless homes across this country (and beyond) that have a Robert Bateman print on proud display, even if he operates outside the art establishment.
Summer Novel (1998), on display as part of Robert Bateman: Heart and Home.Courtesy of The Bateman Foundation
“As he’s getting older and I think more about his legacy and what he’s done for the art world, it’s becoming harder and harder not to defend him,” says his son John Bateman. “Because for so many people, whatever kind of art you like, he has exposed people to the world of art.”
John figures if you asked people to name a Canadian artist, a large percentage would name his dad. “So in that way he’s opened up many people to art. And where they go from there, that’s up to them.”
That was the whole point of making the prints, Robert says. “I don’t pay attention to money and income. It was not to make money. I love sharing ideas.”
Bateman was sitting in the studio attached to the home he and his wife, Birgit Freybe Bateman, built on Salt Spring Island, a sweeping, private retreat they moved into in 2005. The custom-built home is filled with museum-quality finds from around the world, as well as their own artwork; Birgit is an artist too.
The landscaping also tells a story. Everything along the walk from the parking area to the front door is carefully selected – from five different kinds of maple trees as a tribute to Canada, to the lily of the valley planted along the side of the path, his mother’s favourite flower. The scent, he says, “takes me right to my mum.”
There’s a totem pole carved by Nisga’a artist Norman Tait and a bronze frog sculpture by Haida artist Robert Davidson.
Robert Bateman's Birgit (Lithograph).Courtesy of The Bateman Foundation
And then there is the door itself. Carved in Nigeria from a single plank of mahogany specifically for Bateman during his two-year stint there as a teacher from 1963 to 1965, it has been a front door at three homes: the house Bateman built in Burlington, Ont., where he lived with his first wife and their three children; his first home on Salt Spring, on Fulford Harbour; and now this place. “This is the third and final house that it will be on,” he says.
Inside there are more treasures, collected during his travels. They include a large, ornate hutch bought in Switzerland (“made when Mozart was running around”), a piece from a temple in Burma, and a church icon he purchased in Athens that he’s pretty sure he shouldn’t have been sold. “I still feel guilty. We might try to give it back,” he says. “I’ll leave it up to my descendants.” Bateman, at his age, offers a few after-I’m-gone thoughts, such as this one.
In his studio, he has what he calls his “art snob wall,” which includes a Picasso etching, limited-edition prints by Robert Motherwell and Gordon Smith, and one of Smith’s paintbrushes.
There’s a television in there too; Bateman likes to watch TV while he paints. But not while he is coming up with his concepts, his wife pipes up from her desk in the studio. “Painting grasses and fur, I’m on automatic pilot,” he says. “I know what I’m doing.”
Outside the window of the large studio, the birds were active that morning, flying around the feeder – bright yellow goldfinch, Steller’s jays. Inside, on Bateman’s easel, was a little painting of a robin with snowberries – an in-progress piece he started for a birthday present for his wife in 2018 that he hasn’t had time to finish. Completing abandoned projects meant to be gifts has been a top priority lately.
Sitting in his studio, I remind him of something he once said: That the world would be a better place if everyone was a bird watcher. How so, I asked.
Bateman is a staunch monarchist, but also a lifelong environmentalist.Taylor Roades/The Globe and Mail
“It means that you care about lives other than your own,” he explained. “Take people out of the self-centredness and selfishness and particularly to care about a living thing who doesn’t even know you. It’s easy to care about your own kids. But to care about the birds, it’s a complex thing.”
Even that morning, he said, he was putting seed in the feeders, knowing guests were coming. He wanted us to see all the birds. But he had heard on the radio about the avian flu outbreak, and that people really aren’t supposed to be filling their feeders right now. “So am I doing it for the birds or am I doing it for me?” he said. “I’m actually doing it for me. I like them to be around, I like to see them.”
Bateman’s teaching career has been an immensely important part of his life. He studied geography at the University of Toronto and taught high-school art and geography from 1955 to 1976. He always painted, but never expected to make a living from it. In his twenties and early thirties, he experimented with a range of styles, including abstract impressionism. “He was doing this,” Heart and Home curator Andrea Terron says, pointing to Prickly Pear Cactus, an abstract painting from 1959. “And then he realized that he could do that,” she says, motioning to a realist work, Rough-legged Hawk in the Elm (1966).
A turning point for Bateman was seeing the work of U.S. realist painter Andrew Wyeth at Buffalo’s Albright Knox Gallery in 1962. He calls it is his Road-to-Damascus moment. He then dove into the creation of the realist wildlife paintings that are his signature. “There are some people who think nature art’s not art, not real art,” Bateman said in his speech at the exhibition’s opening. “They’re wrong.”
By 1976, it became clear that he could make a living from his painting and he left his teaching position. There were years that were too busy to stop, too busy for much of anything other than painting and the travels that inspired the work. Some years he spent nearly 10 months away from home.
Aging has changed his lifestyle significantly, with travel becoming difficult to impossible.
Even the trip to Victoria for this opening – involving a short ferry ride and a bumper-to-bumper drive into the city – was a big deal, after being holed up at home for so long during the pandemic.
As for his artistic abilities, “I probably plateaued a long time ago,” he said at the exhibition opening. “Because I’m old.”
Paintbrush of Artist Gordon Smith hangs on the wall of Bateman’s home studio.Taylor Roades/The Globe and Mail
Bateman’s politics don’t fit in a box. He is a staunch monarchist – born on Queen Victoria’s birthday, he likes to point out – but also a lifelong environmentalist who has taken part in anti-logging activities and supports the intentions, he says, of the Fairy Creek protestors. “We are too hasty in destroying our natural heritage,” he told The Globe.
But when I asked him whether he’s worried about the kind of climate-changed world he is going to be leaving, his answer kind of surprised me. “Worrying is not helpful,” he said. “So I don’t worry and think about the Taliban or viruses going around or anything like that. How would that be helpful?”
When I asked whether he feels his artwork has helped in the fight against climate change in any way, at the very least by helping people appreciate nature, he also said no. “But all of the letters that come in to us say otherwise,” Freybe Bateman remarked from her desk across the room. “They say, ‘Your art has made me appreciate what we have. And realize that it’s precious and try to protect it.’”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Bateman conceded.
Robert Bateman's Family Hike (2009).Courtesy of The Bateman Foundation
During an interview in Ganges, Salt Spring’s little town, one of his five children offered a different take on this. “He can have a clear conscience about how he’s led his life and how he’s walked the walk and the best thing he can do to leave a better place for his grandchildren,” said John, who is vice-chair of the board of the Bateman Foundation, which promotes connecting nature through the lens of art. “It’s exceptional what he’s done for the Earth and for education and for nature and for art. That’s why this foundation was formed, to keep that going.”
Robert Bateman: Heart and Home was John’s idea. Now 54, he had been thinking about mounting this kind of personal show about his father for a long time. The opportunity came up faster than expected when a George Clutesi retrospective planned for the Bateman Centre this year was delayed.
Over tea, John tells me about some of the gifts his father has made for him over the years. A particular favourite was a recreation of Dire Straits’ debut album cover, in which a young John became the lone shadowy figure. For his 21st birthday, his father made a painting that commemorated a trip to Africa they had taken. John kept saying that they would spot a lesser kudu, a kind of antelope that his father had never seen and desperately wanted to. Then one night, while looking at a Verreaux’s eagle owl, they turned around, and there were two lesser kudu, just standing there.
That piece is one of the highlights of the exhibition. The personal aspect is “another facet of the artist that people don’t know,” says Terron, who joined the gallery in April and had only seven weeks to put the exhibit together. “In the end, the message is: What are we doing with our connections? What’s our legacy? And what are we doing with that legacy?,” she continues. “How are we connecting with our loved ones? And how are we connecting with nature?”
The many gifts made for Freybe Bateman – jewellery, little boxes, paintings signed with messages like “thank you for coming to my world” – make the show feel particularly personal.
They met when they were both working in education, back in Burlington, and married to other people. (“We’ve been in love 51 years, lived together 49 and married 47,” Freybe Bateman explained to me at their home.)
In his speech at the Victoria opening, Bateman told the story behind the large rock depicted in his painting From the North – Snowy Owl. The painting was made in 2002, but the story he told went way back. “At that time, I was falling in love with Birgit. I put my hand on that rock … and wished that my wish would come true and eventually I would get together with Birgit.” There was a wild apple tree nearby and he grabbed an apple. Employing some magical thinking, he told himself, if the apple was sweet, he would end up with her.
“And I’ve never tasted a sweeter apple.”
Bateman looks out at the water surrounding his home studio on Salt Spring Island.Taylor Roades/The Globe and Mail
Robert Bateman: Heart and Home is at the Bateman Gallery in Victoria until Feb. 28, 2023.
