signed, titled & dated
Provenance: Marlborough-Godard Gallery, Toronto ON; Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto ON (labels verso)
Takao Tanabe is one of Canada’s most important contemporary painters. Having successfully experimented with various types of abstraction beginning in the 1950s, his work evolved into his now well-recognized minimalist landscapes. Tanabe has exhibited for over six decades, and his distinguished career as an arts educator and arts advocate have 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. Appreciated for their transcendent light and atmosphere, these landscapes range from delicate and misty, to stormy and brooding, offering fluctuations within the same piece depending on the viewer. Tanabe, in a 2014 interview published in the National Gallery of Canada Magazine, explains:
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.
