Tamako Kataoka was born in Sapporo, Hokkaido (present-day Sapporo City) as the eldest of eight children. Aspiring to become a doctor, she devoted herself to her studies and entered the supplementary training course at the Sapporo Girls’ High School run by the Hokkaido government. However, upon graduation, a friend’s words inspired her to become a painter, and she moved to Tokyo to enrol in the Private Women’s School of Fine Arts (now Joshibi University of Art and Design). At the same time, she studied nihonga painting under Tadao Yoshimura (1898–1952), a nihonga painter who was active at Kan-ten, the government-sponsored, salon-style exhibition.

After graduating from the Private Women’s School of Fine Art in 1926, Kataoka turned down a marriage proposal arranged by her parents to work at the Ōoka Ordinary Elementary School in Yokohama. She also showed her work at the government exhibition even though Yoshimura had not given her permission to do so, and her paintings were repeatedly passed over. Subsequently, Kataoka was encouraged by Kiyoyuki Nakajima (1899–1989), a nihonga painter who lived nearby and was active in the Japan Art Institute, a private art organisation, to exhibit her work at the Japan Art Institute Exhibition. Nakajima’s advice inspired Kataoka to continue working towards her goal of exhibiting her work at the Japan Art Institute Exhibition.

In 1930, Kataoka exhibited Loquat (1930, collection of Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art) at the 17th Japan Art Institute Exhibition, which had been reinstated, and her work was selected for inclusion for the first time. In 1933, she was again selected for School Girls (1933, collection of Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art), which was painted using her elementary school students as models. After that, she repeatedly failed to have her works selected, to the point where she was even ridiculed as the “god of unsuccessful submissions”. From 1946 onwards, Kataoka had a string of successful submissions, and in 1952 she was nominated to be a dōjin, or a core member of the Japan Art Institute. In 1955, upon receiving an invitation to teach nihonga painting at her alma mater, Joshibi University of Art and Design, she resigned from the elementary school where she had worked for some 30 years. In 1959 Kataoka held her first solo exhibition. She also began to produce works based on traditional performing arts such as kabuki, noh and gagaku (court music). Her Fantasy (1961, collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama), which depicts dancers from the gagaku performances Ranryō-ō and Genjōraku, received the Minister of Education Award at the Japan Art Institute Exhibition.

During the 1960s, a sketch of a caldera lake in Hokkaido sparked Kataoka’s interest in volcanoes, and the theme of Mount Fuji recurred in her work thereafter. In 1966, Kataoka was invited to join the newly opened Aichi University of the Arts, where she became a full professor of nihonga painting. In the same year, she began her “Tsuragamae [Facial Expressions]” series of works based on historical figures, which formed a central aspect of her painting career. This “Tsuragamae” series featured paintings in which she delved deeply into the characters in her own fashion, interpreting and expressing their behaviour in a way that reimagined it for the modern age. The most frequent subject for the “Tsuragamae” series was ukiyo-e artists, with the first of these works being Tsuragamae: Katsushika Hokusai (1971, collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama). For Kataoka, the ukiyo-e artists were people she respected as painters who had influenced Western art, produced work for the general public in Edo and were free to devote themselves to their work without yielding to authority, while the act of depicting them in her paintings was also a form of self-reflection. She continued to produce the “Tsuragamae” series and showed 39 works at the Japan Art Institute Exhibition, continuing until she was 99 years old. In 1979, at the age of 74, Kataoka held her first retrospective exhibition, Kataoka Tamako: Ningen shinri no senretsu na byosya [Vivid Depictions of Human Psychology] (Matsuya Ginza, Tokyo).

On the other hand, Kataoka exhibited her first painting of a nude woman, Pose 1 (1983, collection of Sapporo Art Park), in 1983 at the age of 78. She signed a contract with a model on the condition that she would carry on painting nudes until she was 100 years old, and continued to challenge herself to express the sense of volume and mechanical balance of each part of the body. Kataoka’s last work to be exhibited at the Japan Art Institute Exhibition was also a nude, Pose 23 (2005, collection of Sapporo Art Park), and she was indeed 100 years old.

All of Kataoka’s works are full of bold shapes, vivid colours and a powerful touch, giving them a vibrant, forceful intensity. She continued to devote herself to the study of painting while maintaining a certain autonomous stance that was not beholden to convention, leading a life that was always overflowing with vitality, and tackling a diverse range of themes over the course of her 80 years of painting. Kataoka passed away on 16 January 2008 at the age of 103.