THE "BATEMAN"

        "Have you heard about this guy named Robert Bateman?" I asked. ROBERT BATEMAN? ROBERT BATEMAN?! "He's only the best living WATERCOLOR artist in Canada." A confession I made to Robert about a conversation I had with watercolor artists since I only found out about who he was a week before meeting him. Robert laughed and said thank you. Then he leaned in a bit and whispered, "I actually paint in acrylics and oils." (Some fast facts about him: In the 1950s he went around the world in a Land Rover ; He drew an unusually large crowd for a living artist at his exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute in '87 ; He destroyed his own painting of orca whales demonstrating his protest against the possibility of oil tankers passing through B.C.'s Douglas Channel.)