Miyuki Tanobe

In 1980 Tanobe illustrates the song "Gens de mon pays" by Gilles Vigneault and in 1983 she creates pictures for The Tin Flute by Gabrielle Roy. The colours in Miyuki’s paintings are rich and full of contrast. Working with superimposed layers and applying pigments with her pliable, flexible Japanese brush, Miyuki Tanobe succeeds in revealing unexpected aspects of the objects and people she depicts without making them difficult to read. She paints in Nihonga.

In 1979, she was the subject of a National Film Board of Canada documentary short My Floating World: Miyuki Tanobe, directed by Ian Rankin, Stephan Steinhouse and Marc F. Voizard.

In 1963, possessing incipient artistic gifts, she painted at the studio of La Grande Chaumière in Paris before registering at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, France's leading school of fine arts. Miyuki Tanobe’s arrival in Canada in 1971 came as a result of a chance meeting in Paris with Maurice Savignac, her future husband, a French Canadian from Montreal.

Miyuki Tanobe CM OQ RCA (born 1937 in Morioka, Japan) is a Japanese-born Canadian painter, based in Montreal, Quebec. She is known for her paintings of the everyday life of Montreal residents. Her work is in the collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée du Québec, Lavalin, Pratt & Whitney, and Shell Canada, and Selection du Reader’s Digest. She is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Tanobe was born in 1937 in Morioka, Japan. Because there was a violent snowstorm raging on the day she was born, her parents named her Miyuki, which means "deep snow". Tanobe attended Japanese primary and secondary schools.