Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1929 Georgetown, Guyana

Died: 2010 Scotland

Year of Migration to the UK: 1946

Other name/s: Robert W. Batchelor , Robert William Batchelor

Biography

Painter and printmaker, Bob Batchelor was born to a Guyanese mother and Scottish father in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1929. Brought up in Georgetown, he suffered from tuberculosis and malaria in childhood, but won a scholarship to Queen’s College. His interest in art developed almost by chance. As he later recalled, a schoolfriend who recognised his ability introduced him to an established amateur artist, at a time when formal art teaching in Guyana was limited. After some of his paintings were included in an amateur exhibition, a family who had seen his work encouraged his parents to send him to art school in Britain (Inverness Courier 1990, p. 6). Batchelor initially enrolled at Glasgow School of Art, but, overwhelmed by Glasgow on his arrival in 1946, visited Aberdeen and decided instead to study Drawing and Painting at Gray’s School of Art, where he remained from 1946–50.

Batchelor did not initially aspire to become a professional artist, regarding teaching as his vocation. After graduating, he undertook teacher training at Moray House in Edinburgh. While awaiting a teaching post in Guyana, he found work in Clackmannanshire, where the surrounding Ochil Hills also gave him opportunities to pursue landscape painting. He subsequently returned briefly to Georgetown after being offered a post there, but found it difficult to resettle amid the political and social changes associated with the independence movement. He returned to Scotland and thereafter lived in the northeast for the rest of his life. He taught at several Scottish schools before joining Aberdeen Girls’ High School, later Harlaw Academy, where he spent the final twenty years of his teaching career as Principal Teacher of Art, retiring early in 1986.

Batchelor’s early work consisted mainly of portraiture and landscape, and examples from the 1950s and 1960s include charcoal figure studies, small oils and watercolours of the local landscape. His artistic direction changed decisively through printmaking. When Peacock Printmakers opened in Aberdeen in the mid-1970s, he initially sent senior pupils there to learn new techniques; their enthusiasm prompted him to enrol himself. Screenprinting soon became central to his practice, and he was among Peacock’s founder members and one of the first artists associated with the workshop to present a solo exhibition. The medium encouraged him to abandon the restrained palette of his academic training in favour of the brilliant colour he had long admired in other artists. By applying gradations of colour to separate screens and altering colour separations or omitting stages, he developed screenprints with the fluidity and tonal variation of watercolour, often making individual impressions visibly different from one another.

His best-known subject became flowers and gardens. A passionate gardener, Batchelor cultivated bearded irises, roses, oriental poppies, peonies and camellias in his Aberdeen garden. He later explained that the shift towards floral painting arose partly from circumstance: after selling his car to fund a holiday, he could no longer travel easily into the countryside to paint landscapes and turned instead to what was immediately around him (Inverness Courier 1990, p. 6). He made detailed observational studies of flowers before treating them freely in paintings and prints, responding especially to their colour, structure and fragility. His vigorous brushwork, saturated colour and bold forms could verge on abstraction, while remaining recognisably floral. Commentators associated the intensity of his palette with his Guyanese childhood, although Batchelor himself stressed the importance of close looking and of the accumulated influence of other artists.

After retirement his own work became increasingly continuous and visible. A 1990 solo exhibition at Highland Printmakers Workshop in Inverness, accompanied by an artist’s talk, toured to Wick, Thurso, Fort William, Culloden, Alness, Portree and other Highland venues, followed by a solo exhibition at Kildrummy Castle Gardens, Aberdeen, in 1992. In 1993 his paintings were shown at Candacraig Gardens, another source of inspiration. A major 1994 retrospective at Aberdeen University covered 45 years of drawings, oils and watercolours, while Peacock Printmakers simultaneously presented a retrospective of his screenprints from 1976–94, tracing the development of a style described as both ‘vivid and serene’ (The Scotsman 1994, p. 20). He was a regular contributor to group exhibitions at Tolquhon Gallery, Tarves, and participated in numerous other exhibitions across the northeast. In 1998, Flowers, Flowers, Flowers was shown at the Grampian Hospitals Trust Art Gallery. He also exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) and the Royal Scottish Society of Watercolour Artists. He was elected President of the Aberdeen Artists' Soceity, where he had been a frequent member exhibitor.

Bob Batchelor died in Scotland in 2010. In 2013, friends organised a posthumous retrospective at CLAN House in Aberdeen, bringing together watercolours, oils, drawings and screenprints lent by their owners. His work entered private, public and corporate collections, including those of Grampian Television, Shell and Mobil North Sea. In the UK public domain his work is represented in the collections of Aberdeen Art Gallery and the NHS.

Irene Iacono

Related books

‘Artists Set to Display Their Works’, Aberdeen Evening Express, 2 December 2004, p. 16
‘Northern Reflections’, Deeside Piper, 11 April 1997, p. 17
Nikki McHarg, ‘What’s on’, Aberdeen Evening Express, 6 December 1994, p. 31
‘Last Chance’, The Scotsman, 29 November 1994, p. 20
‘A Trio of Artists’, Deeside Piper, 10 September 1993, p. 22
‘What’s On’, Deeside Piper, 2 July 1993, p. 22
‘Screen Print Tour’, People's Journal, 28 July 1990, p. 8
‘Batchelor of Art Finds Inspiration in Back Garden’, Inverness Courier, 10 July 1990, p. 6
‘News’, People's Journal, 7 July 1990, p. 3
‘Printmaker’s Open Studio’, Highland News, 7 July 1990, p. 12
‘An Exhibition to Brighten Dull November!’, Aberdeen Press and Journal, 5 November 1988, p. 3

Public collections

Related organisations

Aberdeen Artists' Society (member/President)
Aberdeen Girls’ High School, (teacher)
Glasgow School of Art (student)
Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen (student)
Moray House, Edinburgh (teacher)
Peacock Printmakers, Aberdeen (member)
Royal Scottish Academy (exhibitor)

Selected exhibitions

Retrospective exhibition, CLAN House, Aberdeen, Scotland (2013)
Print exhibition, Aberdeen Royal Infirmary Art Gallery, Aberdeen, Scotland (2004)
Flowers, Flowers, Flowers: Bob Batchelor, The Art Gallery, Grampian Hospitals Trust, Scotland (1998)
September Selection, group exhibition, Candacraig Garden Gallery & Nursery, Strathdon, Scotland (1998)
Spring Exhibition, Tolquhon Gallery, Tarves, Scotland (1997)
Northern Reflections, group exhibition, Haddo House Hall, Scotland (1997)
A Garden of Delights, group exhibition, Tolquhon Gallery, Tarves, Scotland (1997)
The Painted Petal, group exhibition, Tolquhon Gallery, Tarves. Scotland (1997)
Paintings of Flowers and Gardens, group exhibition, Castlegate House, Cockermouth (1995)
Retrospective exhibition, Senior Common Room, Aberdeen University, Aberdeen, Scotland (1994)
Bob Batchelor: Screenprint Retrospective, Peacock Printmakers, Aberdeen, Scotland (1994)
Group exhibition with Marilyn Gore Atkinson and Malcolm Cheape, Tolquhon Gallery, Tarves, Scotland (1993)
10th Anniversary Exhibition, The Rosemount Gallery, Aberdeen, Scotland (1992)
Solo exhibition, Kildrummy Castle Gardens, Aberdeen, Scotland (1992)
Consider the Lilies II, group exhibition, Tolquhon Gallery, Tarves, Scotland (1991)
Prints by Bob Batchelor, Highland Printmakers Workshop, touring exhibition, Scotland (1990)
Royal Scottish Academy exhibition, Edinburgh, Scotland (1990)
Summer Serendipity, group exhibition, Tolquhon Gallery, Tarves, Scotland (1988)
Royal Scottish Academy exhibition, Edinburgh, Scotland (1988, 1980, 1979, 1966, 1965, 1963, 1961, 1958, 1955)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Bob Batchelor]