In honour of International Women’s Day on Friday March 8, it seems fitting to feature Victoria print maker Pat Martin Bates. An excerpt from Sensational Victoria:
At 85, Pat Martin Bates is still strikingly beautiful. The day I visit her she has a scarf wrapped around her dark hair and she’s wearing a jacket full of blues, reds, and purples with chunky silver jewelry.
Pat cuts an exotic figure standing in front of her big stone fireplace, where she has spent countless hours down on her hands and knees scraping off the ugly ochre paint from a past resident, once on a New Year’s Eve dressed in full evening wear.
Pat and her husband Clyde Allison Bates (Al) have lived in the Oak Bay heritage house since 1971, shortly after returning to Victoria from a Canada Council Arts Fellowship where she followed the route of Alexander the Great through the Middle East.
“The house,” she says as houses sometimes do, “not only chose us, but demanded us.”
Al said that they have never eaten a meal in their dining room, and it’s not hard to see why. The room is filled with large perforated artworks on paper and framed as lightboxes. In fact, every wall, every surface, every nook of the house is covered in art—either Pat’s own work and sketches, paintings from fellow Limners, small sculptures, cards, books, bowls and plates—the product and the collection of a life lived to the full.
Al flicks a switch and a framed lightbox jumps to life, a technique Pat pioneered in the 1960s, now commonly used in backlit outdoor advertising.
As a contemporary printmaker Pat has represented Canada at the Venice Biennale, in Japan, Yugoslavia, Italy, China, Russia and the Middle East. She applies several techniques in a single work: painting, print making and collage. She still uses her grandmother’s hat pin to pierce holes in the paper and allow in pinpricks of light.
Pat Martin was born in Saint John, NB in 1927. Pat met Al when she was 13 and decided to marry him. “He was unaware of this; in fact, he was unaware of me,” she said. But in June 1948, marry him she did.
“When she met me she said ‘I like your name, but I’m not going to give up mine,’ and it became Pat Martin Bates,” says Al. “This is 60 odd years ago. It was customary to drop your maiden name, but she refused to.”
Pat taught in the visual arts department at the University of Victoria for more than 30 years, and over the years she’s notched up an impressive international reputation, and a long string of professional designations and accolades. Pat says mostly she’s proud of being the only Canadian to received the gold medal in Norway’s Graphic Biennial and also the only woman and Canadian to receive the Global Graphics Award from Holland.
Designed in 1912 by Fred Wood, the house still has the original leaded windows, parquet floors, brass fittings and fireplace, and received a heritage designation in 1997.
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