KWAG - Takao Tanabe, CM, OBC, RCA

Takao Tanabe, CM, OBC, RCA does not have an image.

Takao Tanabe
painter, printmaker
Canadian, b. 1926
Tanabe trained, from 1946, with Joseph Plaskett at the Winnipeg School of Art (MB), before attending the University of Manitoba. In 1951-52 he studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, New York, under Hans Hoffman and Reuben Tam. He took a class in 1953 at Banff with the British painter William Scott. Back in Vancouver, Tanabe learned typography working for Robert R. Reid and founded Periwinkle Press. After briefly attending Banff School of Fine Arts (AB), he traveled in Europe for two years, studying at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London (UK), in 1953. Tanabe learned Japanese ink painting (sumi-e) and calligraphy at the Tokyo University of Arts in 1959-61. He studied with Ikuo Hirayama and Yanagida Taiun, a practitioner of single-stroke Zen calligraphy on a large scale. Tanabe has also admired the quietly powerful art of Caspar David Friedrich and Albert Bierstadt.