Robert Bateman

Location: Manitoba | Profession: Artist

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Robert Bateman 1963

Born in Toronto in 1930, Robert Bateman spent much of his youth looking for painter turtles and minnows in the Belt Line ravine and studying with the Junior Field Naturalists at the Royal Ontario Museum. By the age of 16, he had painted every species of hawk and owl in North America. Though he was an avid painter, Bateman chose to study geography at university instead of art, knowing that he could always paint on the side. After many years of teaching art and geography and traveling around the world, Bateman finally staged his first solo art show at the age of 37. In the blink of an eye, Bateman was an international sensation. Today, he is the world’s most famous painter of wildlife, a man whose work captures the natural diversity he fights so hard through various advocacy channels to protect.

Robert Bateman now

What They Said

I took geography in university instead of art because I didn’t feel you needed to “take” art to be an artist. I still don’t, even though I taught art for 20 years. Being an artist is about what’s inside you. A lot of my heroes - a lot of the Group of Seven - never went to art school.

I took geography so I could do geology and get free trips into the wilderness doing geology fieldwork. I knew that I could paint in my spare time.  Ultimately, that plan worked out very well. I got two trips to the Arctic, one to Algonquin Park  and one to Newfoundland. Meanwhile, I just painted up a storm after hours and on weekends.

I always knew the quality of life I wanted. I didn’t want to live in a city and get in a car on the weekend if I was lucky and drive out and spend an hour in nature and come back to the city.  I wanted to live in nature and go visit the city when I wanted to see an art gallery or a movie or something. I wanted to live some kind of acreage, with nature all around me. That way, I could walk out in my pajamas and check out a bird. I targeted the direction I was going so that I could accomplish that aim.  I knew that from the age of seventeen on.

While I studied geography at university, I took life drawing classes at the Ontario College of Art with Carl Shaffer. During that period I stopped doing wildlife art. A friend of mine who was ahead of me at OCA had informed me that you could not do real art with a small brush. It was 1948 and that impressionists were the accepted style. People were starting to get into Picasso and Braque. Carl Shaffer’s attitude was that, if you couldn’t paint it with the back end of a broom, it wasn’t worth painting. The biggest insult he would cast on something was that it was “precious”: that it wasrefine, with detailed skin or hair or whatever. You didn’t want to do that. You wanted to be bold and expressive.

So I put away my small brushes and picked up some massive ones. I got into Cubism because that was exciting at the time. It would see some Glockus gulls down at the Sunnyside Breakwater in Toronto and I’d sketch them and then come home and do Cubist paintings based on them. That was where I was artistically all the way through university. And quite a few years after that too. I would play more and more with abstraction, but nature would remain my inspiration