Heritage-Bald Eagle (Robert Bateman)

Heritage-Bald Eagle is a large unframed Collectors Edition Giclée canvas art print by Canadian wildlife artist Robert Bateman.

This painting was created for the Robert Bateman Centre, which opened in May 2013 in Victoria, BC. Robert wanted to highlight the fragility of natural and human heritage, in this case the bald eagle and the western red cedar stump. This particular stump is near Courtney, on Vancouver Island.

“This painting has both the bald eagle and the cedar stump. The bald eagle is a natural heritage. I guess you might say the big cedar stump is the human heritage. Although it’s natural heritage to the great West Coast Cedars, some of the trees are immense. They almost all flare at the bottom kind of like a buttress root that you get in tropical rainforest. That creates a bit of an issue for the loggers with these big crosscut saws to cut them down at waist height, which is the natural height you’re going to be doing. Two men saws require one on each end, pulling it towards you and then the other guy pulls it back and you pull it toward you.

They hit upon a way of cutting a notch and putting a plank there and then they stand up on the plank and then they could saw the tree where it was a little more reasonable effort to get through. The trees have a notch on one side and two guys would stand there on the plank. Since cedar lasts so long, there are stumps all over BC which are lasting decades and decades and decades if not maybe centuries and there they are, like a relic, like a castle, like an old building. They are a relic of human activity and a relic of those, the great age of the tree, so I look upon that stump as part of human heritage.” ~ Robert Bateman