Our Green Interview with Robert Bateman has just been posted – more than an hour of reflection on art, education, wildlife, the shaping of consciousness in young people, and appreciation for the natural world. Bateman is among the world's foremost interpreters of nature through the medium of visual art – and, because of his many books and his controversial decision to allow his work to be inexpensively reproduced, one of the world's best-known and most-loved nature artists. His work is elegant, compelling and dramatic, and it brims with frozen narrative.
Bateman was 80 at the time of the interview, in August 2010, but he looked and acted and thought like a man several decades younger. We talked in his studio in Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. To listen in on the conversation – and learn more about Bateman's life and art – click here.
Memories of Robert Bateman
Looked at the clip with Robert Bateman. In our small world Robert Bateman was the art teacher at Nelson High School, Burlington, Ontario where I spent some time. He was also a friend of one of my mentors, Ray Lowes, founder of the Bruce Trail Association. I last hiked with Ray in the mid 1990's when he was in his mid 80's.
With mentors such as Ray Lowes, who started to mentor me at age 5, and role models such as Bateman, who sold his early paintings in the halls of Nelson High School, I was influenced in making life decisions that included living in natural environments. I know a number of other people who were equally influenced and led parallel lives to Kathy and I. In the last third of my life I can now fully appreciate that I was one of the children that Robert Bateman and others were trying to influence and develop an environmental awareness. Their strategy worked! I think a Green Interview with those of us who can identify a change of direction in our lives due to the influences of people such as Robert Bateman, Ray Lowes, Farley Mowat to name a few, would be interesting. I can think of five individuals from Nelson High School of the 1960's whose lives were influenced to the same extent as mine. I'm sure there are many more who chose the road less travelled.
Thanks for making the interview and bringing this circle in my life back for me.