Takao Tanabe

Takao Tanabe, CM OBC RCA (born 16 September 1926) is a Canadian artist who painted abstractly for decades, but over time, his paintings became nature-based.

Biography

Born Takao Izumi in Seal Cove, today part of Prince Rupert, British Columbia, the son of a commercial fisherman, where he was the fifth of seven children. Tanabe and his family were interned with other Japanese-Canadians in the British Columbia interior during World War II. They were relocated first to a camp at Hasting Park in Vancouver and the Lemon Creek internment camp[in the Kootenays in the summer of 1942. Tanabe attended the Winnipeg School of Art, Winnipeg, Manitoba (1946–1949), studying with Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, and Joseph Plaskett. He then studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, New York City, New York with Hans Hofmann (1951) and Reuben Tam (1951-1952). He received an Emily Carr Scholarship and went to the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, UK (1953–1954) and during that time, travelled widely in Europe. From 1959 to 1960, he studied Sumi-e and calligraphy at Tokyo University in Japan on a Canada Council Scholarship.

His works are in public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Glenbow Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Career

His art has gone through different phases. In his “inscapes” (he called his paintings after a term used by Gerald Manley Hopkins) of the late 1950s, Tanabe explored his memories of lit interiors, painting them abstractly and expressing them with calligraphic signs. From 1961 to 1968, Tanabe taught at the Vancouver Art School. In 1968, he worked in Philadelphia, moving in 1969 to New York City where he lived until 1972. In New York, he painted hard-edge geometric abstracts. From 1973, he was head of the art program and artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts. By then, he consciously considered landscapes as a subject, while progressively eliminating references to the specific. In 1980, he returned to British Columbia where he lives and works on Vancouver Island. He is considered today a painter who primarily evokes the landscape of British Columbia in minimalist paintings.

In 2005, a major retrospective of his work curated by Ian Thom was organized and circulated by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Vancouver Art Gallery.