Tanaka Ryōhei

Tanaka Ryōhei

田中良平

Tanaka Ryohei

printmaker

For more than fifty years, Tanaka Ryōhei has delighted print collectors around the world with his evocative scenes of the Japanese countryside. He is often limns rustic farmhouses, of the sort where he himself was born and still lives in a on the outskirts of Kyoto. Tanaka works in copperplate etching, a medium that represented a radical departure from traditional woodblock prints when he took it up in the early 1960s. He has created a distinctive and immediately recognizable style, working with extraordinary discipline and patience to capture the varied textures of the landscape—wood, stone, aged thatch, or foliage.

Thanks to the generosity of several donors, the Portland Art Museum collection now includes fifteen of Tanaka's prints, spanning from 1965 to 2007.

Male