Painter, draughtsman and printmaker, born at South Bank, near Middlesbrough, Yorkshire, where his father worked on the river. On leaving school Tabner did a foundation course at Middlesbrough School of Art, then in 1965 transferred to Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, where he met his future wife, the sculptor Helen de Paravicini. Teachers at Corsham included Adrian Heath, Martin Froy, Michael Kidner and Howard Hodgkin. Then did a postgraduate two-year course at Reading University under Claude Rogers and Terry Frost, visiting tutors including Hodgkin, Froy and Heath. From 1970 settled in a cottage he had bought at Boulby, Teesside, on the highest cliff in England, extending the building himself and buying 250 acres of land and coastline to preserve it.
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Tabner’s subjects were man at work and the challenges of nature. He painted wild places, on North Sea oil platforms and on trips with the Royal Navy to the Falklands, South Georgia and the South Atlantic. Agnew had a show of paintings and drawings, 1970–1989 in 1989, and in 1992–3 Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, and Agnew gave Tabner a retrospective, for which a new book, A Voyage to the South, was published. In 1995, Tabner was commissioned by the prefectural government of Gifu, Japan, to paint in Shirakawa in the Haku San mountains, central Japan; he painted in western Ireland with Peter Prendergast; and visited America, working in Oklahoma and Texas. In the next decade further journeys included arctic Norway; northern Alaska and the Beaufort Sea; northwest Scotland and the remote islands; at Boulby; in north Wales; and again in Japan. As well as continuing to contribute to group shows, such as the 1995 Centenary Exhibition at Christie’s, Tabner had a one-man at North Light Gallery, Huddersfield, in 2001, another at Messum’s in 2006, that accompanied by an extensively illustrated catalogue. By then, he had work with the British Museum; Science Museum; Contemporary Art Society; Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle; Darlington Art Gallery; Gifu Memorial Museum, Japan; and in many other private, public and corporate collections in Britain, America, Europe and Asia.
Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)
