Takao Tanabe

Kathy E. Zimon is a fine arts librarian (emerita) at the University of
Calgary. She is the author of Alberta Society of Artists: The First 70
Years and co-editor of Art Documentation Bulletin of the Art Libraries
Society of North America.

Takao Tanabe, recipient of the Governor General’s Award in the Visual
and Media Arts (an award he helped establish), is among Canada’s most
distinguished landscape artists. Born in 1926 in the fishing village of
Seal Cove (now Prince Rupert), B.C., to Japanese parents, his education
was curtailed while the family was interned during the war years. Hoping
to find work painting signs, he enrolled almost by chance at the
Winnipeg School of Art, where the new principal, Joseph Plaskett, became
his role model as an artist, a mentor, and a lifelong friend.

During the 1950s, Tanabe studied in New York with legendary abstract
artist Hans Hoffman; won a scholarship to study in London; travelled in
Europe; and visited Japan to explore his heritage, studying sumi-e
painting, calligraphy, and other traditional techniques. Although
assimilating these techniques in his painting, he confirmed that his
primary affinities were with Western art. His career also encompassed
teaching at the Vancouver School of Art and the Banff School of Fine
Arts, as well as printing and graphic design with Bob Reid in Vancouver.
Best known for his reductionist landscapes, Tanabe was also a pioneer of
abstract art who had a profound interest in “the edge between
abstraction and representation.”

The four contributors to this volume each focus on one aspect of Tanabe
or his work: Ian Thom provides a biographical essay; Roald Nasgaard
discusses the abstract paintings of his early career; Nancy Tousley
considers the spare landscapes of the prairie paintings, created with a
“single spontaneous gesture,” a goal shared by abstract
expressionists and calligraphers; and Jeffrey Spalding assesses his work
since 1980, after his return to the West Coast, in the context of the
modernist canon that “formal progress” is the goal of art. This
multi-layered examination of Tanabe’s work is accompanied by many
splendid colour plates that illustrate his preoccupations with the
mist-shrouded coastal landscape or the flat planes of the prairie, and
how light, colour, and gesture can convey their essence on canvas. A
chronology and selected bibliography supplement the text. This beautiful
book is highly recommended for all Canadian art collections.