Sold for: $61,250

PROVENANCE
Corporate Collection, Calgary

LITERATURE
Ian Thom, Takao Tanabe: Life & Work, 2023, https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/takao-tanabe/style-and-technique/

Queen Charlotte Strait 2/87: Outside Hardy is a mature example of Takao Tanabe’s well-known stormy and brooding seascape paintings that emerged in the late 1980s. Inspired by his residence on Vancouver Island, Tanabe would explore the eastern part of the Island and the adjacent channels, fjords, passages and inlets of the Northwest Coast.

Ian Thom, in his book Takao Tanabe: Life & Work, writes: “For Tanabe, an ideal painting of the coast is one obscured by ambient details, an image that does not put everything out in the open, but invites deeper contemplation.”

Thom goes onto describe the artist’s working method and intent:

With his West Coast paintings, Tanabe’s goal was to make work that “just appeared” despite all of the time and labour involved in production. As Tanabe has described: “I’ve tried to submerge my artistic idea of being an individual, with individual brush markings.… What I wanted was the image to just appear, magically. There is no sense of the energy of the hand putting the paint on the surface and being a mark.… It’s there, it just appears.”

In Queen Charlotte Strait 2/87, as our eye is inevitably drawn to the bright horizon beyond the charcoal sea and beneath the deep-grey clouds, we can appreciate both the drama of this seascape and the “magical” artistry created by Tanabe.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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