Words & Photo ArtSpring
This May, coinciding with legendary Canadian artist, educator and conservationist Robert Bateman’s 95th birthday, comes an extraordinary never-before-seen exhibition entitled Confluence: The Bateman Collection, at ArtSpring on Salt Spring Island, where he resides.
While Robert is best known for his prolific body of work of highly realistic depictions of wildlife and nature, wife and artistic partner Birgit Bateman is also a venerable and much exhibited photographer. Together, they have been a life force not only in the art world, but in fundraising for and awareness of environmental causes.
Partners in life, in the studio and in world travels, they have amassed a fascinating private collection of art from fellow artists who inspired the artistry within themselves, as well as cultural artifacts from adventure and advocacy journeys to Africa, Asia, both Poles, and here in the Pacific Northwest.
Hundreds of paintings, prints, sculptures, Indigenous pieces, fine art photography, personal family photos and story-filled artifacts have been meticulously curated and moved by hand from the Batemans’ home and storage to ArtSpring’s gallery for the first and only time.
Robert and Birgit’s fine art collection includes works by Arthur Lismer, Gordon Smith, Jack Shadbolt, Robert Motherwell, Ron Kingswood, Bruno Liljefors, Rockwell Kent and many more.
There will be select works by both Birgit and Robert, including the original of his spectacular Vancouver Island Elegy (at right), the large-scale 1989 triptych piece that famously evokes a sense of loss and change on Vancouver Island in the face of logging and industrialization.
Birgit’s photography takes viewers from a flock of Demoiselle Cranes in Keechan, India to a Massai mother and daughter in Africa to the whale bone skull from St Lawrence Island, Alaska, as well as family snapshots of Robert with boat carvers in Papua New Guinea.
Pieces from members of their artistic family, including a touching portrait by eldest son Alan Bateman of his father in a canoe, also make the list.
From Inuit soapstone carvings and prints by famed Kenojuak Ashevak to photos and stories about Jane Goodall; from sketches Robert did while birdwatching with Princess Takamado of Japan to Nigerian ceremonial bride pots to a commissioned painting for Princess Grace – the exhibition is a personal behind-the-scenes glimpse of the inspirations and cultural touchstones that represent the Batemans’ extraordinary life story.
It is a confluence of creativity, conservation, philanthropy, and most of all, love.
Exhibition at ArtSpring daily May 18 to 30, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
100 Jackson Avenue, Salt Spring Island
Curated by Zoe Zafiris-Casey
www.artspring.ca
