signed recto; signed, titled & dated verso
Provenance: Marlborough-Godard Gallery, Toronto, ON (label verso)
Takao Tanabe is one of Canada’s most important landscape painters, having evolved from an abstract painter into painting the landscape. He has exhibited over six decades and his distinguished career as an Arts Educator and Arts Advocate earned him both the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia. He was associated with the Banff School of Fine Arts (now the Banff Centre) from 1973-1980, where he headed the Art Department and was an artist-in-residence. Tanabe brought new vitality to the painting program in Banff and turned his attention to the landscape there, developing a well-known series of prairie paintings.
A Tanabe landscape is uniquely his own, stripping away non-essential details and creating serene compositions, rewarding long, considered viewings and contemplation. He is well known for his transcendent light and atmosphere, fluctuating from delicate and misty to stormy and brooding.
Tanabe, in an 2014 interview published in the National Gallery of Canada Magazine, notes “I decide to paint a landscape and I am a Minimalist type of painter. But I avoid the manmade stuff which is the railway lines, the telephone poles, the grain elevators and cows. I didn’t put in any cows. So essentially, it’s stripped down human intervention to the basic, which is kind of just patterning the landscape……..It might be my old age. But the whole idea is Mother Nature, not human intervention, that I see and try to paint.”
