Ronald C Bateman is a British painter born in Wales in 1947.
Having studied art in Cardiff and Swansea in the late 1960s he completed a Masters degree at the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, in 1972. His first solo exhibition was held in 1977.
Over the following twenty years he exhibited mainly with the Marian Locks Gallery in Philadelphia. Many of his pieces remain in the United States in both private and public collections. His body of work spans small drawings to large public murals.
Bateman’s visually striking realist compositions often employ allegory, symbolism and a wry humour in a subversion of the still-life genre.
Microcosm worlds are seen from an omniscient viewpoint. The substitution of the man-made for the natural co-opts the traditional compositional elements of flowers, fruit and foliage to manipulate meaning through visual and literal language. Works such as ‘March 1881’ 'Colonialism' or ‘Nitrates’ present us the largest ideas in the smallest of settings.