A painter can work in oil, acrylic and watercolor; a sculptor in stone, metal and wood.

Artist Patrick Nagatani's medium is masking tape.

He searches the world for it, for different hues, widths, translucency and stickiness.

The rolls, his palette, are piled high in his Albuquerque studio. No two are the same color or size.

"I'm a tapist," Nagatani says. "A painter with tape."

It's a modest assessment, typical of the man, that barely scratches the surface.

Nagatani's résumé is 22 pages, single-spaced and abridged. His artwork has been in more than 2,000 group exhibitions and nearly that many solo shows spanning the globe, from the flashy - New York, France, Italy, Germany, England, Spain, Venezuela, Japan - to the down-home - Lubbock, Texas; Turlock, Calif.; Fort Dodge, Iowa; Morrestown, N.J.

He's in prestigious national and international public collections and has received dozens of fellowships, grants and awards, including from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

"World renowned" is a tired phrase, but in Nagatani's case, it applies.

For the past 20 years, he has taught photography in the department of art and art history at the University of New Mexico. His presence helped UNM's graduate photography program rise to No. 2 on U.S. News and World Report's list of the country's best, tied with the Rhode Island School of Design and one spot behind the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

He is without question an outstanding living artist, but you wouldn't know it to see him, unassuming in weathered cargo shorts, tennis shoes and baseball cap. If you live in the University Area, you've probably bumped into him walking his dog Annie or carrying groceries to his studio.

"I saw him the other day at the park," says Shelley Simms of UNM's Jonson Gallery. "I thought, `Wow, there's Patrick Nagatani.' People had no idea."

Nagatani, 61, retires from UNM as a professor emeritus on June 30 to devote himself full time to art. His sendoff includes a major show of his masking-tape pieces at Downtown's 516 Arts gallery. A survey of his work from 1996 to 2006 and a major publication, "Desire for Magic," are planned at the UNM Art Museum in 2009. It's expected to become a traveling exhibit.

He leaves behind a rich legacy of teaching and making art.

"He's a man of few words, but he listens and he's aware," says Erin Emiko Kawamata, a student of Nagatani's who just completed her master's degree. "He's intellectual and very creative. He gets really excited about the act of creating something."

Mary Tsiongas, a professor in the department of art and art history, calls Nagatani "a huge figure in the art community, both because of his work and because of his generosity with his time and energy."

A tapist

While Nagatani has produced several bodies of groundbreaking photographic work, his masking-tape pieces are perhaps his most distinctive.

"I call them `tape-estries,' " Nagatani says.

He did his first taped piece in 1983, stumbling on the technique while photographing cathedrals in France.

"I was spray-painting over the images and using masking tape to block out areas," Nagatani says. "One day I decided to leave the tape on."

He starts the process with photographs. Some are from postcards, some from other printed sources. He often assembles collaged images; for example, a towering cactus with a burro or person superimposed; Japanese calligraphy behind a Buddha; a wedding party on the steps of a church.

The final image is scanned and made into a large chromogenic photograph. The print is cold-mounted to museum ragboard. Nagatani adds paint to the picture to enhance certain visuals so they'll stand out when covered with tape.

"The photo gets manipulated, but it's not paint-by-numbers," Nagatani says.

The taping begins, but first, using music and relaxation, Nagatani gets into a meditative state, a "no-thought zone," so he can settle into hours of applying tape and let the work flow, not overthink it.

"It's a very zen thing," he says. "It takes me away."

Nagatani covers the image with strips of masking tape by cutting and tearing them into pieces of varying lengths, widths and shapes. He works from the background to the foreground, creating layers, textures and surprising depth.

"These are my paint strokes," he says.

Sometimes he'll leave an area, such as hands or a figure, untaped for emphasis.

The result is mesmerizing, a veil of hazy color and intricate design through which to view the image. A simple material, masking tape, produces a complex canvas, lends a spiritual quality.

After hundreds of hours of work, even 1,000, Nagatani places the last piece of tape.

"I say `That's it' and play Earth, Wind and Fire a few times," Nagatani says.

He seals a piece with several coats of fluid matte medium that soaks through the tape onto the image, adding adhesion and keeping oxygen from yellowing the tape. A UV inhibitor is the final touch.

"They're like mummies, lovingly preserved," Nagatani says.

He says the taped photographs are more personal than his other work because "so much revolves around the process and my joy in doing it."

A teacher's advice

Nagatani was born in Chicago in 1945 to Japanese-American parents who met in the Windy City when released from their respective internment camps after World War II. Both were from California, and they returned there with their son in 1956.

Nagatani earned a bachelor's degree in industrial arts from California State University at Los Angeles in 1968 and went to work teaching drafting and shop at the inner-city Alexander Hamilton High School.

The young teacher was a volleyball player and voraciously read the classics. He was the school's athletic coordinator and yearbook adviser. He won a national drafting contest and did technical illustration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

He built scale models and painted.

Then Nagatani enrolled in a drawing class at Santa Monica City College.

"I could copy anything," he says. "I was the hit of the class."

There was one skeptic.

The instructor showed Nagatani a painting by Paul Cezanne and told him art is about subjectivity, not about duplicating reality.

He challenged Nagatani to complete the class using only a camera, to reverse his process by using a tool that reproduces an image to create art.

"I went into hunter mode. I'd go out and find stuff to photograph," Nagatani says. "I liked the camera. I thought about what makes a great photograph.

"I never looked back."

Nagatani did his last painting in 1975.

He got work in the film industry building models and sets, and he began thinking like a director behind his own lens.

"I created images like a filmmaker and worked in the directorial mode," he says.

His work got him into graduate school at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he earned a master's degree in fine arts in 1980.

"I knew what I needed to know about photography. I was self-taught," he says. "At UCLA, I studied with Robert Heinecken and I wanted to earn an MFA degree to teach in higher education."

Heinecken, noted for redefining the role of the photographer and perceptions of photography as an art medium, became a lifelong mentor, friend and influence over Nagatani's creative life.

Nagatani left Alexander Hamilton High and built a résumé over the next seven years: photography instructor at West Los Angeles Community College and Otis Art Institute of the Parsons School of Design; visiting artist/instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; artist residency, California Arts Council; assistant professor of art, Loyola Marymount University.

He drew national attention when he collaborated with painter

Andrée Tracey on a series of photographs that addressed global issues. The two staged elaborate sets - made up of backdrops, furniture, objects and live figures - and shot them with a large-format, 20-by-24-inch Polaroid camera.

The photo tableaux had social commentary and black humor and challenged the traditional role of photography as a way to document reality. They blurred the boundary between the real and the artificial.

Nagatani says it was a productive time, and the Nagatani/Tracey images became well known.

"I get chills when I think of that time period," Nagatani says.

Inspired by books

Nagatani came to UNM in 1987, drawn by the school's national reputation in photography and, as a Japanese-American, by New Mexico's role in launching the nuclear age.

He added to his stature with a provocative series of large-format photographs and a book titled "Nuclear Enchantment." After traveling the state and reading extensively on development of the atomic bomb, he constructed sets and assembled narrative photo tableaux chronicling New Mexico's relationship with the nuclear industry.

The color-drenched images are scathing and thought-provoking: missiles, bombers, green radon gas, dead animals, mushrooms, nuclear waste containers, graveyards and innocent people, many of them Japanese.

He comments with humor and horror on the collision of culture and weapons research on the state's landscape.

Nagatani later photographed Japanese-American internment camps and explored history and archaeology in his work. Most of Nagatani's artwork is inspired by reading.

"Scientific books, cosmology, chaos theory," he says.

A celebrated group of photographs called the excavation series told the stories, through sets built by Nagatani, of a group of Japanese archaeologists following maps and finding luxury cars buried at such sites as Chichén Itzá in the Yucatan.

"Basically, I am a storyteller at heart," he says. "I write novels and short stories with the medium of photography."

A cancer survivor

Nagatani was found to have colorectal cancer in May 2005. He underwent major surgery in July of that year, an experience he documents in some of his recent artwork.

Several pieces feature a stoma, the opening in the abdominal wall created by the cancer surgery. Nagatani shows his surgical scars in other images.

And his series of "Chromatherapy" photographs convey the process of healing with light.

The cancer is part of the reason Nagatani is retiring; he says it slowed him down.

"There was a realization of the quality of life and time," he says.

But he also wants to be a full-time artist, to do one job instead of two.

"I've had two jobs since I was 24 years old," he says.

Tsiongas says Nagatani leaves big shoes to fill.

"I will miss him," she says. "He's dedicated and has a joyful attitude. He delights in things."

"He lives to make art," says his student Kawamata. "He's always in a studio, always making something. He taught me to care. He allowed me to think more carefully about ideas."

Michele Penhall, curator of prints and photographs at the UNM Art Museum, says Nagatani will be hard to replace.

"It's going to be tough, because he's part of a generation of photographers who really saw photography more than just the singular kind of image approach, not just documenting things," she says. "He saw photography as more a conceptual thing, where it's about the process and the idea behind it, not just taking a particular image.

"His being is embodied in his art. It will be a very different landscape without Patrick."