Additional Images

Provenance:

Marlborough-Godard Gallery, Toronto, ON;
Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Literature:

Takao Tanabe: The Dark Land, (Hamilton, ON: Art Gallery of Hamilton, 1980), pl. 4, pp. 6, 8, 9, as Prairie Hills 5/80 (late night).

Exhibited:

Takao Tanabe: The Dark Land, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, ON, 19 Jun-20 Jul 1980; Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, ON, 27 Jul-7 Sep 1980, as Prairie Hills 5/80 (late night).

Note:

Marrying representation with abstraction, this painting was produced during Tanabe’s stay in Banff, Alberta, 1973-1980, while he was head of the Visual Arts Department at the Banff Centre. Travelling through the foothills and flat plains of the area, the artist was struck by the deceptive complexity of the Canadian Prairies. The super-flat horizon and the multi-layered washes of colour appealed to Tanabe, who would spend years painting and drawing these landscapes. Speaking to the CBC in 2011, he noted: "It’s so simple, but it’s very complicated. It’s not putting in mountains here and little bumps here – it’s absolutely flat with a little bit of plough lines, especially in the summer, the different colours of the field…and then there’s a big empty sky. It’s a challenge." (1)

In writing about Tanabe’s night scenes, Nancy Tousley explains that “The drawings of the prairie at night achieve a kind of pinnacle in Tanabe's career: the deepest mystery, the strongest representation of experiential sensation, the most profound sense of time and the most reductive imagery and means. The drawings themselves evoke the experience of standing alone in the dark. Swimming darkness stops the eye, requiring an adjustment of vision to search out the light and the barest forms it illumines. Space is expressed not as an air-filled volume but rather as an almost impenetrable shadow-fled mass. A timeless sense pervades the otherworldly night aura." (2)

It is Tanabe’s incredible subtlety and masterful deployment of this most minimal palette which elevates this painting into a work of genius. It summons to mind a quote by Antoine de Saint Exupéry: “In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.” The Prairie is by definition an elemental landscape, but Tanabe is able to prune his subject even further, editing it down from prose into poetry.

(1) CBC News. “Takao Tanabe’s Love Affair with Landscapes | CBC News.” CBCnews, December 7, 2011. https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/takao-tanabe-s-love-affair-with-landscapes-1.1038917.

(2) Nancy Tousley, Takao Tanabe: The Prairie Paintings, Takao Tanabe, ed. Ian Thom. (Vancouver Art Gallery and Douglas & McIntyre: Vancouver, 2005), 91.