I won’t beat around the bush:

Robert Bateman is an important late 20th century/early 21st century artist.

There is no debate.

The issue has been settled by Bateman himself, based on the body of his work, the progression of which you can enjoy now at Wildlife Art Journal with the lengthy profile titled The Spectacular and Troubling World, According to Robert Bateman.  

Bateman is his own category. He has taken flack for being a commercial sensation as a print artist. And it is a yoke he will always carry.

His import, however, is not merely tied to the range of imagery he has put on canvas all these years; any discussion must necessarily include consideration of how the Canadian Realist has used his art to make a social statement on human values and the relationship of those values to monumental environmental challenges.  These issues, like the growing national debt, will weigh most heavily on future generations.  For the choices we make now we heir the consequences to those who follow.

Bateman has been a tour de force.  That’s why we put him and his image, Tiger Trade, on the inaugural virtual cover of our magazine.  Click on it and see it blow up large.  The image is gripping.  It forces you to think, to turn the light switch on in your brain.  And, where Bateman is concerned, he hopes that it will cause you to care, if not feel a sense of outrage over the fact that imperiled wild tigers are being slaughtered to feed the appetite for human vanity.  In essence, the internal organs of dead tigers are being used to create an ancient medicinal version of Viagra.

Along with the feature story on Bateman, we are offering you an essay penned by the artist himself titled “Why I Am A 21st Century Conservative .”  This too, should force you to think.   Bateman  isn’t politicizing art.  He’s saying forcefully that political labels don’t work.  What matters is reflecting on the things that are important to us.

Later in 2009 and on into 2010, Bateman’s work will be featured in a special one-man exhibition at four venues in Russia, including the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg near the Hermitage and another high profile museum in Moscow.  This summer, in North America, you can visit another showing of his originals, part of a major traveling exhibition, at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff  on an extended run through September 7, 2009.

Or, you can virtually attend the Bateman retrospective we’re offering you now at Wildlife Art Journal .

As you peruse our gallery filled with Bateman’s soothing images painted over the last half century, pause and ponder the first three. They depict a mountain of Arctic sea ice; an orca gliding through an underwater kelp forest; and a polar bear on thin ice.  Remember this:  All are disappearing or in decline.  With predictions that the northern ice pack could be gone within a few decades, it means that over a large part of their historic range, polar bears as a functional species tethered to specific habitat could go extinct.  In our lifetime.  Before our eyes.  Extinction is forever.  Being indifferent is not an acceptable option.

Over the years, I have come to know Bob Bateman and I can tell you he has a huge heart, a bold vision, and he is deceivingly brilliant. He is an artist who cares, his critics be damned.  Bateman’s art either has resonance or it does not.  You don’t have to like it to understand its message.  It needs no interpreter to crack some obscure code known only to the artist.  Along with David Shepherd in the UK, there isn’t another living nature artist who has shucked aside rational self-interest more to promote conservation, which benefits all of us.  This alone makes Bateman and Shepherd, and their work, important and worthy of being celebrated in the finest of fine art museums.

The fact that they force us to think is the quintessence of the artist’s purpose– that is, if we believe art is supposed to have a purpose beyond the solitary self-motivation of the artist who makes it.