Sold for: $16,520

PROVENANCE
Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

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

In 1950 Takao Tanabe traveled to New York, and in 1951 took classes there with Hans Hofmann and at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Consequently he was influenced by Abstract Expressionism, which dominated the art scene there at the time. Back in Canada, and as the 1950s progressed, Tanabe evolved an expressionist style with gestures that were calligraphic in nature - a distinctive language of gestural form that he described as a “kind of writing hieroglyphics.” Like the works of other West Coast modernists in the 1950s, such as Jack Shadbolt and Gordon Smith, Tanabe’s paintings could be described as lyrical abstraction that incorporated natural forms. For four or five years, until 1958, Tanabe worked on his White Painting series, which, like this bold and expressive canvas, incorporated landscape motifs with abstraction, and which he gave titles referring to landscape. Of these works, artist Joe Plaskett wrote, “I like to think that these landscapes emerged out of the strokes and fragments of colour, that they were spontaneously generated and came with complete naturalness and inevitability, as everything that is good must come.”

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