Arctic 1/89: Barren Lands (Tree River)
https://archives.westvancouver.ca/link/fineart364
- Artist
- Tanabe, Takao
- Material Type
- Fine Art
- Date Range From
- 1989
- Repository
- West Vancouver Art Museum
- Artist
- Tanabe, Takao
- Material Type
- Fine Art
- Accession Number
- 2019.001.003
- Date Range From
- 1989
- Artifact Category
- painting
- Description
- The numbers in the title are because in each case the painting was part of a series using that title. The last number, in this case 89, refer to the year the work was made.
- Height
- 121.9 cm
- Width
- 76.2 cm
- Material
- acrylic on canvas
- Credit / Acknowledgement
- Gift of Takao Tanabe
- Artist Biography
- Takao Tanabe was born in Prince Rupert, BC. He graduated from the Winnipeg School of Art in 1949, and eventually settled in Vancouver in 1952. In 1960, he traveled to Japan to study calligraphy and the Japanese ink-wash technique, sumi-e. He is well-known for his abstract and landscape works, where he reduces geographical forms and colours to only their essentials. Takao Tanabe’s career as a visual artist has spanned over sixty years, a period throughout which his artistic production has undergone numerous stylistic and formal changes. Moving freely between what we often consider contradictory realms—abstraction and high realism—Tanabe has painted in constant pursuit of new formal possibilities, experimenting with diverse methods and approaches to visual representation. Ever-present in his lifelong aesthetic journey is a tension produced by his refusal to wholly submit to either representation or non-objective form. Even at their most abstract, his forms often remain suggestive of landscape. The same can be said for his most realistic representations; carefully observed and meticulously rendered, these landscapes still exude a quality of distillation and artistic reticence—an intentional withholding of visual information which enables the images to transcend a simple recording of details.
- Repository
- West Vancouver Art Museum