Listen to Michael's note · 8 min
My father is in his eighties now. I think about what that means for the work more than I used to.
There is a comparison I keep returning to, the great Japanese swordsmiths, the master craftsmen of the samurai tradition, who brought to the forging of steel the same patience and precision that my father brings to a brush. Theirs is a discipline that does not transmit. Not because the techniques cannot be written down, but because the techniques were never the point. The point was the accumulated attention of a lifetime, the decades of looking before a single mark was made, and the decades more of making marks until the hand and the eye became the same thing.
Glen's work cannot be meaningfully imitated. This is not a boast, it is an observable fact. Every feather in every bird is individually placed. Every strand of fur is individually rendered. Where other artists, skilled artists, will suggest a difficult passage with a thick brush, or dissolve a complex form into atmospheric mist, or hide what they don't want to paint behind a conveniently placed branch, my father paints what is there. He has always painted what is there. The difficulty is not a technique. It is a character trait.
As Maclean's observed, he paints with the patience of St. Francis and the persistence of a bloodhound. He has been known to spend three days with meat tossed to a lynx just to study the facial contortions of an animal at the moment of a strike. He paints what he sees, not what is convenient to see.
He still draws. I hope he always will. But he works at his own pace now, and a man who once made forty-five sketches before beginning a painting is not going to build a second body of work. What exists is, in the main, what there will be, and it was made by someone who never took a shortcut in his life.
My father is in his eighties now. I think about what that means for the work more than I used to.
There is a comparison I keep returning to, the great Japanese swordsmiths, the master craftsmen of the samurai tradition, who brought to the forging of steel the same patience and precision that my father brings to a brush. Theirs is a discipline that does not transmit. Not because the techniques cannot be written down, but because the techniques were never the point. The point was the accumulated attention of a lifetime, the decades of looking before a single mark was made, and the decades more of making marks until the hand and the eye became the same thing.
Glen's work cannot be meaningfully imitated. This is not a boast, it is an observable fact. Every feather in every bird is individually placed. Every strand of fur is individually rendered. Where other artists, skilled artists, will suggest a difficult passage with a thick brush, or dissolve a complex form into atmospheric mist, or hide what they don't want to paint behind a conveniently placed branch, my father paints what is there. He has always painted what is there. The difficulty is not a technique. It is a character trait.
As Maclean's observed, he paints with the patience of St. Francis and the persistence of a bloodhound. He has been known to spend three days with meat tossed to a lynx just to study the facial contortions of an animal at the moment of a strike. He paints what he sees, not what is convenient to see.
He still draws. I hope he always will. But he works at his own pace now, and a man who once made forty-five sketches before beginning a painting is not going to build a second body of work. What exists is, in the main, what there will be, and it was made by someone who never took a shortcut in his life.
There is a photograph of me in a book my father gave me. I am small, standing at his elbow in the studio, holding a sheet of pencil studies while he works. The caption beneath it, in calligraphy, reads: The work progressed with a little assistance from my son Michael.
The book documents the Siberian Tiger. Electrolux Corporation of America commissioned my father to paint their corporate symbol life size, on a stretched canvas 5.75 feet by 7 feet. The Royal Ontario Museum loaned him a Siberian tiger skin, which lay on the studio floor for the duration of the work. He engaged the photographer Ursula Liane to keep a complete visual record of the painting as it progressed, and the result was bound in leather with gilt edges and signed by both of them. Edition number one of one. There is no other copy.
I spent almost twenty years at a company called Crystal Sensations, building 3D models in Maya and translating them into subsurface laser engravings inside blocks of crystal. Exacting work, and the problem at the centre of it was always the same: taking something that exists in one medium and making it read correctly in another. You either solve that precisely or you do not solve it at all.
There is a photograph of me in a book my father gave me. I am small, standing at his elbow in the studio, holding a sheet of pencil studies while he works. The caption beneath it, in calligraphy, reads: The work progressed with a little assistance from my son Michael.
The book documents the Siberian Tiger. Electrolux Corporation of America commissioned my father to paint their corporate symbol life size, on a stretched canvas 5.75 feet by 7 feet. The Royal Ontario Museum loaned him a Siberian tiger skin, which lay on the studio floor for the duration of the work. He engaged the photographer Ursula Liane to keep a complete visual record of the painting as it progressed, and the result was bound in leather with gilt edges and signed by both of them. Edition number one of one. There is no other copy.
I spent almost twenty years at a company called Crystal Sensations, building 3D models in Maya and translating them into subsurface laser engravings inside blocks of crystal. Exacting work, and the problem at the centre of it was always the same: taking something that exists in one medium and making it read correctly in another. You either solve that precisely or you do not solve it at all.
Then COVID arrived and we were all sent home with notices. I had time and no plan. What occurred to me was that I could use it to learn Shopify and e-commerce properly, and that the thing worth learning it on was my father's work. I taught myself all of it, the platform, the marketing, the colour, without a course or a background in any of it.
Before I said a word to my parents, I ran a test. I printed the Blue Jays and worked at it until I believed it was right. Then I showed my father. He teared up. My parents looked at it and told me it was better than what they had been able to produce when they were in business themselves. They had no idea I had been working on any of it.
That was the moment the gallery stopped being an experiment.
Reproducing a Glen Loates is not a printing problem, it is a colour problem. His technique layers watercolour, India ink, and Chinese white in passages so fine that a careless scan flattens a wing into a smudge. A print house that has never seen the original does not know what it is losing. So every image offered here is prepared from the archive and checked against the work itself, and when something is not right, it does not go up.
In the photograph on this page I am holding that book open beside the Siberian Tiger on my screen, scanned from the original transparency, checking the colour against the record. I am doing what I was doing in the photograph inside it. The only difference is what is in my hand.
Then COVID arrived and we were all sent home with notices. I had time and no plan. What occurred to me was that I could use it to learn Shopify and e-commerce properly, and that the thing worth learning it on was my father's work. I taught myself all of it, the platform, the marketing, the colour, without a course or a background in any of it.
Before I said a word to my parents, I ran a test. I printed the Blue Jays and worked at it until I believed it was right. Then I showed my father. He teared up. My parents looked at it and told me it was better than what they had been able to produce when they were in business themselves. They had no idea I had been working on any of it.
That was the moment the gallery stopped being an experiment.
Reproducing a Glen Loates is not a printing problem, it is a colour problem. His technique layers watercolour, India ink, and Chinese white in passages so fine that a careless scan flattens a wing into a smudge. A print house that has never seen the original does not know what it is losing. So every image offered here is prepared from the archive and checked against the work itself, and when something is not right, it does not go up.
In the photograph on this page I am holding that book open beside the Siberian Tiger on my screen, scanned from the original transparency, checking the colour against the record. I am doing what I was doing in the photograph inside it. The only difference is what is in my hand.
Loates' work appears at auction from time to time, pieces from private collections, estates, inheritances. I watch these sales closely. What I see, consistently, is significant work selling for a fraction of its value, not because the buyers lack resources, but because they lack context. They are looking at a wildlife painting. They don't know they are looking at one of the most significant bodies of work in the history of Canadian art, made by an artist whose technique cannot be replicated and whose career cannot be extended.
Auction houses are not equipped to tell that story. Their cataloguers are generalists. The lots move quickly. The provenance is noted but the significance is not explained. And so work that deserves to be understood as a serious acquisition is treated as decorative, and priced accordingly.
This gallery exists, in part, to change that. Every page here is an attempt to give you the context that an auction catalogue never will, to show you not just what a piece looks like, but what it took to make it, what it means in the arc of a remarkable career, and why it will not be made again.
An educated collector is not just a better customer. They are a better steward of the work. That is what I am here to build.
If you have encountered Loates' work at auction or through an estate and want to understand what you are looking at, I am here for that conversation.
Loates' work appears at auction from time to time, pieces from private collections, estates, inheritances. I watch these sales closely. What I see, consistently, is significant work selling for a fraction of its value, not because the buyers lack resources, but because they lack context. They are looking at a wildlife painting. They don't know they are looking at one of the most significant bodies of work in the history of Canadian art, made by an artist whose technique cannot be replicated and whose career cannot be extended.
Auction houses are not equipped to tell that story. Their cataloguers are generalists. The lots move quickly. The provenance is noted but the significance is not explained. And so work that deserves to be understood as a serious acquisition is treated as decorative, and priced accordingly.
This gallery exists, in part, to change that. Every page here is an attempt to give you the context that an auction catalogue never will, to show you not just what a piece looks like, but what it took to make it, what it means in the arc of a remarkable career, and why it will not be made again.
An educated collector is not just a better customer. They are a better steward of the work. That is what I am here to build.
If you have encountered Loates' work at auction or through an estate and want to understand what you are looking at, I am here for that conversation.
Every piece is produced to museum standards: archival, acid-free stock, pigment inks rated for generations, gallery-quality framing. Delivered worldwide.
Every acquisition is covered by our complete satisfaction guarantee.
And if you write to the gallery, you are writing to me. I answer questions about the work, its provenance, or which piece belongs in your space, personally.
You can buy wildlife art anywhere. You can only own a Glen Loates here.
~ Michael Loates
The Glen Loates Gallery
Every piece is produced to museum standards: archival, acid-free stock, pigment inks rated for generations, gallery-quality framing. Delivered worldwide.
Every acquisition is covered by our complete satisfaction guarantee.
And if you write to the gallery, you are writing to me. I answer questions about the work, its provenance, or which piece belongs in your space, personally.
You can buy wildlife art anywhere. You can only own a Glen Loates here.
~ Michael Loates
The Glen Loates Gallery
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