PROVENANCE
Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto
Private Estate, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Becky Rynor, An Interview with Takao Tanabe, National Gallery of Canada, July 21, 2014, https://www.gallery.ca/magazine/artists/an-interview-with-takao-tanabe, accessed August 27, 2024

Following his return to British Colombia from his teaching position at the Banff Centre in 1980, Takao Tanabe turned his attention towards the “mists and fog and storm” shrouding the West Coast landscape. Evening 3/85, Kungit is an expansive horizontal canvas typical of this later work that is nearly symmetrical in its composition. By layering successive thin washes of amber, tobacco, and ochre tones directly onto the unprimed canvas, the artist captures the warm glow of a disappeared sun surrounding the most southern tip of the Haida Gwaii archipelago. The silhouetted island with its crown of round clouds is all that delineates the sea from the sky, whose gradated colour fields are nearly mirrored. Tanabe would have completed this painting in his studio in Errington on Vancouver Island based on photographs and sketches from his journeys through the coastal wilderness. The final work embodies his process of the translation between image, memory, drawing and painting. Simultaneously, “Evening” achieves a synthesis of Tanabe’s stylistic concerns throughout his career, namely, to bring closer the advancements of abstract expressionism with the limitless inspiration of the BC landscape.

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