Art At Home LIVE | Takao Tanabe

Hard-Edge Landscapes

Wednesday, June 10 | 1:30 PM

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Let’s make Art At Home!

Join Christina Jones, Family Programs Coordinator, twice a month on Wednesday afternoons to hear stories about the incredible lives of artists and their approaches to art-making in a LIVE Art At Home session on Zoom.

Experience the power of storytelling through art, and discover a new activity that you can try with your family at home!

In this edition of Art At Home Live, we will take a closer look at the life of artist Takao Tanabe and explore how he creates calming, thought-provoking, abstract landscapes that show us the unique ways that he sees light and atmosphere.

Taking inspiration from Tanabe’s work, we’ll create our own hard-edge or geometric landscapes.

Experiment along with us! All you’ll need is paper, masking tape and something to add colours, like crayons, pencil crayons or markers – whatever you have at home.

Get involved! Submit questions as a family during the Zoom presentation using the Q&A function. You can also engage with your fellow attendees and host during the event using the Chat function.

New to Zoom? Learn how to register and attend a webinar here »

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Takao Tanabe is one of the most important landscape painters in Canadian art and a tireless supporter of the visual arts in Canada. He has long been identified with the landscape, but his approach to this subject matter has radically changed over the course of his career. Senior Curator Emeritus Ian M. Thom has described him as the “poet of the ocean shore.”

Born in 1926, in the small fishing settlement of Seal Cove, near Prince Rupert, BC, Tanabe and his family were unfortunately among those of Japanese ancestry “resettled” during the Second World War. Tanabe eventually moved farther inland, joining his brother in Winnipeg. There, immediately following the war, he attended the Winnipeg School of Art. After graduating, Tanabe returned to Vancouver in 1949, and, over the next few years, he travelled to New York, Europe and Japan to study art. During this time, he taught both commercial art and painting at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design) and eventually became Head of the Art Department and Artist-in-Residence at the Banff School of Fine Arts in 1973. Tanabe chose to explore the prairies that were familiar to him and produced a major series of prairie landscapes, pared down to two elements: land and sky. In 1980, Tanabe moved to Vancouver Island, where he took up permanent residence and turned his attention to the coastal landscape.

Tanabe has exhibited his work internationally and is the recipient of several honorary degrees, as well as the Order of British Columbia, the Order of Canada and the Governor General’s Award.