The artist as mega-star

Robert Bateman is one of Canada's best-known artists, his books and prints are bestsellers, and he was recently mobbed for autographs at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Val Ross writes. So who needs art critics?

VAL ROSS

September 15, 2007

KLEINBURG, ONT. -- In its four decades of existence, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., has never seen a day like last Sunday. The gallery usually gets a few hundred weekend visitors; last Sunday it had more than 2,000. Cars spilled from the gallery's ample parking lots down the highway. The cause of the excitement, a tanned, fit 77-year-old with whitening blond hair and Robert Redford-esque looks, was scheduled to sign books from 2 to 3 p.m. Mobbed, he stayed till 6, surrounded by security guards. "He was like a rock star, only with 70-year-old women fans, and they can get testy," says Stephen Weir, McMichael publicist.

Robert Bateman is Canada's most popular visual artist, and one of the most successful abroad. Not in Venice Biennale circles, but for anyone who can afford his coffee-table wildlife art books or his limited-edition, signed and numbered prints. Go online at the Robert Bateman Virtual Art Gallery (as Japanese and German collectors do) and you too can own his Above the Rapids - Gulls & Grizzly for $210 (U.S.), or a limited-edition print on canvas for $1,035 (U.S.). Richer collectors shell out the tens of thousands of dollars for his original oils and acrylics.

Many of Bateman's dozen or so books are bestsellers, as the latest, a children's book, Birds of Prey, and The Art of Robert Bateman ($47, an updated, full-colour version of his 1981 book) seem poised to become. His new show of the same name - about 50 works, from boyhood watercolours, to bronze sculptures and acrylic and oil paintings, some dozen of which have not been seen outside private collections - will be at the McMichael until Oct. 28, before moving on to the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Neb., and then to Denver; Jackson Hole, Wyo.; and San Diego.

So, the Bateman biz is thriving. This permits its founder to be only mildly annoyed when recalling that someone at the Art Gallery of Ontario reportedly told a CBC interviewer that Bateman couldn't be shown at the AGO because he was "a commercial artist."

Well, how did Andy Warhol treat art-making? Bateman asks, as he crosses his lean legs and sinks into a couch in the home of Noreen Taylor, chair of the McMichael board of trustees. "I can't deny that prints have been good for me. But I do not paint for prints. My publisher, Mill Pond Press, is free to say yea or nay."

He produces 10 or 12 original paintings a year and has done 600 prints since 1978. "I'm quite productive, but I am hopeless at business," he says. A battery of dealers looks after the Bateman print traffic, and two secretaries to handle the interview and charity requests. Donations of Bateman prints have raised some $6-million for various causes, mostly to do with nature conservancy (though his generosity turns up in the strangest places. On British Columbia's Saltspring Island, where Bateman lives, his painting Thinking Like a Mountain graces the back of the $100 "Saltspring dollar," a denomination accepted by local craftsmen and hoarded by tourists as souvenirs). His wife Birgit, an abstract artist, keeps the books.

So if this man isn't a commercial artist, what is he?

He's the Toronto kid who more than six decades ago was enchanted by the natural-history dioramas at the Royal Ontario Museum and who at age 12 apprenticed himself to the man who made them, Terry Shortt. "He put his heart and soul into the passenger pigeon and the African rain-forest dioramas," says Bateman. Shortt also looked over young Robert's sketches, giving him tips such as "Never make a bird larger than life-size or it will look horsey."

Bateman set out to be an artist. He studied at the Ontario College of Art. He experimented with cubism and ropey Group of Seven painting styles. But he reversed the direction his colleagues were taking in contemporary art.

He works from the abstract into the figurative. He sees a Clyfford Still abstract with two white blobs in the middle, and quotes the composition in Sheer Drop with two white mountain goats. He sees Franz Kline's calligraphic works and reinterprets them as a jagged rail fence (and then adds red-winged blackbirds).

So those museum dioramas are still top of Bateman's mind (he's "horrified" to see that the newly renovated ROM has banished them). Dioramas are designed to teach, and as much as he is an artist, Bateman is an advocate. He spent 20 years of his adult life in Burlington, Ont., with a two-year teaching stint in Nigeria trying to make art clear and explicit to high-school students. He is a great explainer, and in person, he is a hard man to divert from what he is trying to impart.

Likewise, in his paintings, there's little room for digression or outside interpretation. This may be what bugs the art critics: His work bypasses them and heads straight for people to whom he can make strong declarative statements about big topics that concern him. The evils of industrial fishing? Bateman flips through one of his books to a painting of two corpses, a seagull and a dolphin, tangled in netting. "This to me is a tragic painting," he states. "A million birds a year are turned into garbage by driftnet fishing. It's called 'by-catch'; Birgit called it 'by-kill.' " Harvesting old-growth forests? It's hard to miss Bateman's message in Self Portrait with Big Machine and Ancient Sitka. But these works also have their purely visual magic: some loose, impressionistic brushwork in the margins of a patch of foliage; abstract sheets of colour that create radiance in a scene of wet grass.