The Land 22/77 1977

The Land 22/77 is a landscape that has virtually no subject other than the remarkable light and the track leading into the distance. As such it is a quintessential example of one of Tanabe’s most significant bodies of work. As critic Nancy Tousley writes, “The Prairie Paintings are landscape at its most fundamental: sky and land divided by a horizon line, representational images that come very close to abstraction.”

One of the most satisfying aspects of this remarkably rich and subtle image is that wherever the eye falls there is movement and visual excitement. The slight lightening of the sky just above the horizon is easy to miss at first glance, but essential to the spatial depth of the image. The whole work vibrates with an almost electric energy despite the lack of subject. This effect is not accidental. As Tanabe has commented, “In my compulsive way, once I get started I feel I have to get every little movement of the surface.”  No one else painted the prairie this way. As Tousley also notes, these works approach abstraction, and yet for many viewers, they are the Prairies.

Tanabe began this important phase of his artistic career in the summer of 1972. That year, he was invited to lead the art program at the Banff School of Fine Arts (now known as the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity). His journey across the continent from the East Coast took him through long stretches of the Prairies. The vast expanses of relatively empty landscape appealed to him, and when he was offered a full-time position in Banff he accepted. Although Banff has a magnificent mountain setting, Tanabe’s attention was drawn elsewhere, specifically to the prairies and foothills. Alongside his administrative and teaching duties, Tanabe began to focus his attention on a series of prairie paintings that would redefine the image of that landscape. These paintings include The Land 3/75, Banff, 1975, and Foothills Looking West 3/83, 1983.

In a 2011 interview, Tanabe said that the creation of these expansive landscapes may appear “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.”  From 1973 to 1980 he produced more than two hundred paintings in this series. The sense of seriality was important to Tanabe, but this does not mean that the works are the same. Though the canvases share the artist’s desire to depict the landscape with as little evidence of his own hand as possible, they are, ironically, very much Takao Tanabe’s paintings.