HALF-HIDDEN in the shadows of green-blue foliage, a great dark cat crouches on a mossy branch, hanging high over nowhere in total stillness.
It's a scene of tension and mystery, made totally credible. "Shadow of the Rainforest - Black Jaguar," painted by Robert Bate-man in 1992, combines the Canadian artist's skill, research and instinct."I'm always looking for the commonplace detail," said Bateman, speaking from Venice, Fla., "as in the painting of the jaguar - that would be nothing if it wasn't for the bedraggled leaves."
The painting is one of the atmospheric spreads in his new book, "Robert Bateman: Natural Worlds" (Simon & Schuster, $60). Other images conjure up contrasting scenes: a polar bear dwarfed by the icy wastes, endless horizontals, amid which it stands; Rocky Mountain sheep nestled on a sunny upland patch of flower-dotted grass minutely brushed in over two-thirds of the image's foreground.
Bateman's care for detail goes as much into the setting as into the animal whose habitat it is. This trait recurs through the wide variations in focus, locale and mood of the approximately 130 illustrations in the book, Bateman's fourth, with text by Rick Archbold.
He describes his painting style as realist and says that seeing the work of American painter Andrew Wyeth in the 1960s strongly influenced his own combining of landscape and wildlife.
Bateman, 66, who lives with his wife and family on an island off Canada's western coast, was born and grew up in Toronto. From boyhood he was hooked on the two interlocking interests that still dominate his life: art and nature.
The combination has made him famous. In 1981 the Canadian government commissioned a painting from him for Canada's official wedding present to England's Prince Charles. The Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., mounted an exhibition of his work in 1987; other traveling shows have taken his work around the world.
Bateman's depictions remain resolutely faithful to his subject, with no merely "artistic" liberties taken, said Stanwyn Shetler, botanist emeritus at the Natural History museum, and its deputy director when he curated the Bateman show.
"That kind of realistic art is crucial to scientists," Shetler said.
In 1985, the World Wildlife Fund, Geneva, presented Bateman with its medal of honor, recognizing his increasingly active concern for the environment.
It's a cause to which he channels considerable resources. His fame has given him a platform, he said, and he uses it to speak out.
"I'm afraid I've always been a teacher. . . . Now, with the planet in the shape it's in - well, people come to hear about my art and whether they like it or not they're going to hear about the problems of the planet."
"He works hard to protect the things that inspire his art," said Monte Hummel, president of World Wildlife Fund Canada.
As a hefty contribution, Bateman donates paintings for museum and group fund-raising and allots proceeds from print sales to conservation work. "I don't like the way my career's going if it's only personal profit," he said.
Linda Schaner of Mill Pond Press, publisher of his prints, estimates that more than $10 million from Bateman's print sales has so far been donated to various causes.
But Bateman goes well beyond the art, Hummel said, in throwing his support behind the conservation cause, giving talks, writing letters to the prime minister, whatever's needed.
Bateman has two support staff members who handle business, including requests for help. "I think of myself as a poor man's Ford Foundation," he said. "For example, scientists doing upper-canopy research in old-growth Sitka forest on Vancouver Island needed a cell phone, so that's what we got them.
"It's so wonderful that my life has been blessed so that I can step in and do little things like that."
Bateman balances art and science in his paintings; in his work for the environment, he aims for a similar mix of warning and encouragement, "like some happy juggler," he said.
"My constant struggle, as in my art, is to get that balance right, to talk about how lucky we are and not that this is just a garbage dump.
"I estimate 98 percent of my art is a celebration of how wonderful the natural world is," he said.
Bateman analyzes his art with candor and clarity. He remembers a major landmark in his development as one of today's best-known wildlife artists.
In the 1950s, Bateman explored the art of the times, when painting became more about paint than about the subject, he says. He experimented with cubist and Impressionist styles, and with abstract expressionism, admiring its great exponents such as Pollock, de Kooning and Franz Kline, for their color, sweeping forms and spontaneity.
"But ultimately that's pretty simple," he said. "However, nature is far more complex than that. You can't just show it with great gobs of paint."
Then in 1962, he saw an exhibition of Wyeth's work, in Buffalo, N.Y., that was a turning point "not just for me, for realism in Western art."
"That show made it permissible for artists to start dealing with subject matter again," he said.
In 1963 when he began painting naturalistic wildlife scenes, it seemed to him that "virtually all wildlife art was illustration, not the landscapes with wildlife that I started doing."
He thought he was the only one combining the Wyeth feeling for landscape with wildlife, he said; now he realizes there were "giants" already doing it. But "I think I was one of the first to have that detailed landscape look, that now many others are doing."
In fact, there's a critical element, he said, "which thinks I've been a nefarious influence on these `Bateman clones,' that following my style has taken them away from freedom and looseness of style."
The critics may have a point, he says, although during his 20 years as an art teacher he encouraged his students to follow their own bent, hoping he didn't start any of the Bateman clones.
"I really like the work of some of my colleagues who don't have a photographic style. Some of them are very vibrant and spontaneous. I wish they were better known."
But wildlife artists can be too impressionistic or abstract, said Shetler. Realism like Bateman's is highly valued by scientists.
"Artists can generalize in a way the camera cannot," he said. Artists can produce natural history illustrations no camera can do to order, and that's why they still illustrate nature books, he said.
"Bateman proves the value of maintaining that form of art - and the public responds to it in a very positive way, too."
In the original art for "Robert Bateman: Natural Worlds," the artist has used, variously, acrylic, oil, gouache, watercolor, lithograph and etching, graphite and mixed media. The images reflect his wide travels, researching his subject from the arctic to the tropics, from west to east.
Bateman's plans include a book-signing and speaking tour scheduled to take him to cities in Michigan, Illinois, Ohio and several other states, including visits to Washington, D.C., and Des Moines, Iowa, in November; and including New Orleans and Las Vegas in December.
An exhibition of Bateman's original paintings is planned at the National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson Hole, Wyo., next year.
And there's a web site where Bateman can be reached. "I'm a bit of a neo-Luddite but I'm on the Internet," he said. His address is:
(www.batemanideas.ca).