THE
AVENUE GALLERY
COMPOSITION WITH MOON AND TREE 1
Ken Campbell CATCH THE SKY Oct 6 - 19 Artist's reception Oct 9th 12:00 - 3:00 pm (artist in attendance) 2184 Oak Bay Avenue, Victoria, BC V8R 1G3 T 250-598-2184 • F 250-598-2185 info@theavenuegallery.com • www.theavenuegallery.com
THE
from Joseph Plaskett, who had studied in New York with Hans Hofmann — one of the seminal figures of abstract expressionism. That inspired Tanabe to become an abstract artist himself. By 1951, he was studying with Hofmann in New York, in between summer stints working as a handyman at what is now The Banff Centre for Continuing Education where he also took the occasional art class. In 1953, Tanabe was awarded a $1,200 Emily Carr Foundation scholarship which allowed him to spend two years in Europe studying, painting and working part-time as an art teacher at a girls’ school in London. When he returned, he settled in Vancouver and worked as a graphic artist while exhibiting what he called his “white paintings” (abstract impressions of nature) at galleries across Canada. Four years later, he was on the road again, this time on a $2,000 Canada Council scholarship to Japan, where he studied traditional sumi-e painting and calligraphy. Between 1968 and 1972, Tanabe lived and worked in Philadelphia and New York. He painted hard-edged geometric abstractions, and worked under the table as a non-licensed plumber and electrician. “I was barely selling enough paintings to cover the rent,” he explains. His hard-edged abstractions gradually evolved into semi-abstract landscapes and eventually into representational landscapes. “I guess I was always a landscape painter,” he said when he came back to Canada in 1973 to reorganize the art program at The Banff Centre and put it on a more professional footing. Twenty years earlier, when Tanabe took classes at The Banff Centre, the English painter William Scott had identified Tanabe’s abstract expressionistic work with real or imagined landscapes. Tanabe worked and painted at Banff for seven years, turning away from the mountains to capture the big skies and folding landscape of the prairie grasslands in a series of introspective paintings called The Land. In 1980, he quit the Banff job and returned to British Columbia. “I was born on the west coast and feel most at home here,” he says. Today, at age 79, Tanabe divides his time between Vancouver where he has an apartment and where his wife Anona works as a statistician with the Canadian HIV Trials Network, and the Vancouver Island community of Errington, near Parksville, where he has a home, a studio and an eight-hectare property. Here he paints coastal and other landscapes that the Toronto critic John Bentley Mays says, “deliver a sense of place almost too inhumanely vast, too beautifully grand for comfortable human dwelling.” In the catalogue that the Victoria and Vancouver art galleries have co-produced with Vancouver publisher Douglas & McIntyre in conjunction with the current retrospective, curator Ian Thom writes the following about Tanabe’s recent work: “The images that Tanabe has produced of the province of British Columbia are amongst the most important images of this region, and are a remarkable testament to the exceptional vision and skill of this artist.” After the show closes in Vancouver it moves to Halifax, where it will be on view at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia from May 27 to August 27. In early 2007, it goes to Kleinburg, Ontario, where it will be seen at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection from January 27 to May 21. After that, the organizers hope to bring the retrospective to Winnipeg.
AVENUE GALLERY
MORNING ON THE MARSH
The Takao Tanabe retrospective runs October 7 to January 2 at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and January 14 to April 17, 2006, at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Takao Tanabe is represented by Equinox Gallery in Vancouver, Paul Kuhn Gallery, Calgary, and Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto.
Russ Willms SLIGHTLY ASKEW Oct 27 - Nov 9 Artist's reception Oct 30th 12:00 - 3:00 pm (artist in attendance)
Brian Brennan is the author, most recently, of Romancing the Rockies: Mountaineers, Missionaries, Marilyn & More, published by Fifth House Ltd. His profiles of Western Canada’s distinguished senior artists appear regularly in
2184 Oak Bay Avenue, Victoria, BC V8R 1G3 T 250-598-2184 • F 250-598-2185 info@theavenuegallery.com • www.theavenuegallery.com
Galleries West. www.gallerieswest.ca
Fall / Winter 2005 Galleries West 59