Tina Takako Prentis

Tina Takako comes from an artistic family with deep roots in the ancient island kingdom of Okinawa, in the very south of Japan. Her doctor father was a keen amateur painter, her mother a renowned teacher of ikebana and calligraphy, and her elder sister is a successful artist who has won a number of national awards in Japan. But Tina was to forge her own path. Rebelling against the strict patriarchal atmosphere of a traditional Japanese home, at the age of 20 she ran away to Tokyo where she supported herself while studying French in the evenings at the prestigious Athene Français and painting with the artist Taka Yamaguchi at his Tokyo studio at weekends.
Together with her husband Simon, a British translator and interpreter she met in Tokyo, she left Japan in 1986 to travel through China and the US on an intensive 8-month trip to explore the roots of their shared East-West culture, an experience that remains an inspiration in her work. The couple then settled in London, and over the next two decades Tina enthusiastically applied her artistic talent to creating eclectic and inspiring interiors for the homes where they raised their two children – a practical skill she went on to refine through a study program at the KLC School of Design in Chelsea. With her children grown up, she is now able to devote more time to her original love of painting - and as her repertoire grows, she finds she particulary enjoys creating bold, emotionally powerful combinations of colour and form in a style she describes as 'Figurative Abstract'.