Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Victoria, BC

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]

Nancy Tousley records that Tanabe likes to joke that in Banff, he painted the same picture over and over again.[2] “The Land” employs Tanabe’s ‘one-shot’ technique, in which the artist would apply pigment with a single, rapid application, without adjustments once the paint has dried. In this they harken to Japanese ink paintings, which leave no room for revision. Tanabe began each painting not en plein air, but in his studio, having carefully thought out the painting’s form beforehand and using photographs, sketches and notes to guide him. Images that did not translate from mind to hand were rejected, and begun anew. Specific locations became generalised, reduced to their essence – a tenet that echoed Tanabe’s decades-long work in abstraction.

Per Tousley, “When the stripped-down image then met and paralleled the stripped-down essence of Tanabe's one-shot painting process, the essential quality of each became emphatic, leading perhaps to the fact that many of his prairie landscapes give rise to the feeling that you, the spectator, like some long-ago explorer, are the first person ever to lay eyes on them.”[3]

[1] CBC News. “Takao Tanabe’s Love Affair with Landscapes | CBC News.” CBC News, 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), 71.
[3] ibid, 85-91.