Born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Bates graduated from the Royale Académie
des Beaux Arts, Antwerp, in 1957. She then pursued studies at l’Institut
National des Beaux-Arts, Belgium, l’Académie de la Grande Chaumiére and
the Sorbonne in Paris and the Pratt in New York on an Ingram-Merrill scholarship.
Internationally renowned, she has won awards in art biennials since 1963,
with the grand award of honour for Canada in the First Bienal de Grabado
of South America and Prix d’achats in Great Britain, Japan, Switzerland,
France and Italy. She has also won prizes from Norway and Ljubljana, as
well as Queen Elizabeth’s silver jubilee medal, the Zachenta medal in
Poland and a bursary from the Edinburgh Festival.
Her work is found from the national galleries of Canada and the U.S. to
the museums of modern art in New York, Tokyo, Osaka, Oslo and Vancouver.
Bates teaches art at the University of Victoria.
Song of the Midnight Sun
In her print, Pat Martin Bates combines thoughts on living in harmony
with the creatures of the earth, where the recognized becomes the unrecognized.
As a child she experienced the utter uniqueness of life on the kitchen
floor of her granddad’s New Brunswick cabin when she stared in awe and
bewilderment at a tawny, mellow and beauteous dead lynx. Its ears were
erect as if still listening. Bates recalls an African safari years later
where she saw the glory and grandeur of the free.
The artist uses the mandorla as a symbol of the universe, incorporating
the Greek sumbolon mark and a token sum together with the bole. In the
intersecting eye of the two circles, the world above and the world below,
there is hope for the vanishing point. David Day’s Doomsday Book of Animals
lists many extinct creatures yet makes it clear that there is hope still
for Earth’s many threatened species.
One photoetched copper plate. Printing followed by a chine collé application
of gold Japanese tea chest paper. Image is approximately 12” by 9” (20cm
by 23cm)