Dali House

Back in my rocket-salad days as a reporter with a smalltown newspaper in southern Ontario, Canada, I did a writeup on a local store called Art Effects that was doing a whale of a trade in limited-edition prints by the likes of John Seery-Lester, Terry Isaac, Carl Brenders and, as I couldn’t resist putting it, the “aptly named Trisha Romance”, who lived perilously close to my printed disdain.

These were the popular crop of Canadian painters who specialised in woodland idylls and just plain corniness. It was all the rage back in the property market’s boom years, when “decorative yet cheap” was a sales pitch and probably still is.

Trisha Romance (”Generous Heart” seen here) was, I wrote, “winning converts by the score with painting after painting of old-fashioned houses, each brick distinct and a whimsically nostalgic family scene played out in the front yard”.

I was clearly reining in my bile, I suppose, but I’m still sniggering 16 years later. Let’s continue.

“In the years BB (Before Bateman), limited-edition prints customarily numbered fewer than 200. Now, 1,000 copies are not uncommon, and La Bateman, Audubon to the Stars, generates tens of thousands of ‘limited-edition’ prints at a single bound.

“Like him, the up-and-comers are predominantly wildlife painters. The shop owner calls the overall genre ‘wildlife and snowy houses — it’s a North American passion’), and Art Effects is like a menagerie as you stroll among the wolves and eagles and moose.” Shown here is George McLean’s “A Narrow Escape — Great Horned Owl and Squirrel”.

The shop was struggling to keep up with demand and had just rearranged itself to make a little breathing space in the “barn”.

“Regulars know there’s a little more elbow room since its early months, when customers stepped back to get a better look at a Seery-Lester and trod on a raccoon by Terry Lester.”

Ha-hah! What fun.

This is to be sure, though, a serious business back in rugged old Canada and the urban dots in Canada that like to think they’re still rugged. The uber-trendy Toronto Film Festival might be able to pull in Jack Nicholson for a wave to the fans between hors d’oeuvres, but most Canucks would rather go snowshoeing or sit in the warm glow of the TV reminiscing about what a great world it was before there was TV.

On TV, or out snowshoeing, they might catch a glimpse of Robert Bateman, who used to live in a posh place in the woods just down the road from where I grew up (he taught high-school art and geography in Burlington), but long ago moved to a corner of Canada that’s genuinely wild: the rocky, foggy, balmy-pretend-it’s-tropical northern tip of Vancouver Island.

He’ll be 77 this year, according to his own website’s calendar, though I still picture him looking like a collegiate thirtysomething in pullover, with athletic visage. He’s 77? Maybe I should be a little more respectful!

Nah.

The technique isn’t that great, and for all his windy tirades about conserving nature over the years, I don’t think he’s accomplished anything beyond getting rich. Princes Charles and Philip own bits of his work, as did Princess Grace of Monaco, but these I’m sure were paintings gift-wrapped and handed across the podium at some nature-lover’s gathering.

I once “owned” a Bateman. It was a little oil he’d knocked off when he was still a boyscout and gave to a mentor. The mentor died and I just happened to be renting his house for a while (”Look — a Bateman!” I’d tell everyone who came over). Then they auctioned off all the mentor’s stuff and this cruddy little painting fetched something like $15,000 on name alone. I knew I should have copied it and kept the original.

Bateman, to his credit, has always been modest, and on his website he asserts, “I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever done a masterpiece.” Then he trashes other wildlife artists (not by name, of course) for also falling short of his definition of a masterpiece: “You should feel you are seeing for the first time, and it should look as if it is done without effort.”

“Yet another wolf,” he complains of the other guys, “or another loon, or some other overworked subject done in the same old way. And, it looks as if it is done with a great deal of effort – every feather or every hair painted in great detail, but no sense of form or air or space or time, and often flat as a pancake.”

So I guess it’s good that Bateman, many years ago, stopped painting wolves and loons with all their fur and feathers just so. He went out and got himself an iceberg. The Group of Seven did this before him of course, but he went to Antarctica, not mere Baffin Island, and anyway …

“Iceberg & Humpback Whales”, shown above, is from 1999, “one of those magical evenings”, he says. “The sea was like glass” and they set off in dinghies to get close to the bergs. There were no whales, “but they could have been there” and he got a glimpse of one the next day. I think it’s a terrific painting, one I’d love to have hanging in my house if I had a house and didn’t get a Canadian chill every time I looked at it. The man knows his water.

Back to the birds. This is “Defensive Stand – Siberian Crane” from that same year, created so that the International Crane Foundation could make fund-raising posters to boost crane appreciation in China and those dinky little ex-Soviet countries where it’s to be hoped they hold off on crowding the Siberian to near-extinction, as happened in the West with its whooping cousin.

Bateman saw this bird at the foundation’s compound in Wisconsin and picked up on its angular “sabre threat pose”, which the artist explains comes just before the crane leaps on a perceived threat in a blur of beak and claws.

@ @ @

If Robert Bateman achieved (national) stardom with his scowling barn owls, Ken Danby made it with hockey players. Both Ontarians are extremely gifted realists, I’m not denying that, but I think they’re gifted marketing men as well. Maybe Canada makes that a requirement for success. And once you’re there, you can do no wrong. Just hang in there and you’ll get a state funeral to go with your Governor-General’s Medal.

Danby, who’s 67 this year, made paintings that have become Canadian icons, most notably “At The Crease” from 1972, seen here, and “Pancho” from the year after that, below. (Shouldn’t that be “Poncho”?)

He was “the school artist” by age 10, leapt upon the Ontario College of Art as soon as they’d let him in the door and went travelling in abstract land for a while before Toronto’s Gallery Moos gave his new figurative work a one-man show in 1964 and every single piece was snapped up.

There’s not a Canadian who hasn’t noticed you can see all the raindrops on Pancho’s poncho, but beyond the fact that, in the 30 years since, they’ve licked many, many postage stamps bearing Danby prints, few probably pay attention now. The headline “Danby does Wayne Gretzky portrait” does little for fans of art or sports these days.

His website is for buyers, just like Bateman’s. There are a lot of daft quotes, like “We do not see with our eyes, but through them”. There are a lot of travelogues. He explains how “Renaissance” came about in 2004: “We were visiting Vinci, the town near Florence, Italy, where Leonardo da Vinci was born … This was the home of Leonardo’s grandfather, a notary and farmer, and it was here that the young Leonardo learned to read, think, and absorb the natural world around him.

“The morning was overcast and drizzling, but … then — blue sky suddenly appeared and the sun offered an amazing light show behind dark dramatic clouds. This is what prompted my interest in creating the painting … a visual metaphor for the very essence of Renaissance - a rebirth, a new beginning.”

The composition is certainly striking. I love the picture. I really should stop reading artist’s websites.

Nice, but other than (some of) the Group of Seven, hasn’t Canada ever produced a truly great artist?

Me, I like Colville. More on him soon.