Sold for: $55,250

PROVENANCE
Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto
Xerox Canada, Toronto

LITERATURE
Ian M. Thom et al., Takao Tanabe, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2005, essay by Nancy Tousley, pages 87 and 88

What could be more emblematic of Alberta than the foothills, those “sensuous undulating swells south and west of Drumheller, and the gently rolling almost flat stretches east of Red Deer,” in the words of Nancy Tousley. In regard to his series of prairie paintings, Takao Tanabe revealed, “What I think about the prairie is perhaps romantic but it is an enormously simple-looking space and within all that simplicity it’s very, very rich, very subtle.” In comparison to The Land, lot 58 in this sale, which is almost abstract, Foothills Looking West shows an evolution to more specific elements, although pared to their essentials. The stained approach to his paint surface is still there, and Tanabe uses delicate gradations in the golden brown of the land to give spatial definition. The sky, so important on the prairie as a generator of action and change across the open, receiving landscape, dominates here. In Foothills Looking West, Tanabe makes us aware of transcience—capturing light, weather and a moment in time in what Tousley describes as “a vision more metaphysical than material, one that melds Zen and the Sublime Void.”

All prices are in Canadian Dollars