PROVENANCE
By descent to the present Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Ian M. Thom et al., Takao Tanabe, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2005, page 37

This vibrant painting is from Takao Tanabe’s series The White Paintings - a theme begun when he was in England from 1953 to 1955, continued in Winnipeg in 1955 and ending in Vancouver in 1958. In this series Tanabe departed from the kind of Cubist-based, push-pull structure he had adopted while in New York in the early 1950s, instead painting in a calligraphic style, which he described as “a kind of writing hieroglyphics.” His approach was fluid and organic, using hooked, semicircular and boomerang-like forms either rising above or submerging into white backgrounds. Tanabe’s work was part of the wave of lyrical abstraction taking place on the West Coast in the late 1950s, along with work by artists such as Gordon Smith and Jack Shadbolt. Tanabe often gave works from this series landscape-based associative titles, and fellow artist Joe Plaskett claimed that these works were derived from Tanabe’s watercolours of dunes on the coast of Denmark in 1954. Reflections at Dawn is a strong example from this series, active with gestural strokes and shapes, and dominated by a sunny yellow that exudes even more light than the white background.

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