He studied at the Musashino Art University, Tokyo. Ohtake is well-known for creating works out of rubbish (or rather various objects that resemble rubbish) which he has picked up here and there, but among the various objects he collects, are included a large number of photographs.

He is a painter, collagist and sculptor. Probaly his most famous exhbition catalogue or book is London/Honcon 1980 (1986), which recorded his experience of two very different cities through a combination of spontaneous sketches and collaged fragments of the ephemera that caught his eye.

The book Dreams (1988), was a mammoth visual diary of his Dream Life accompanied by colour reproductions of 100 gouaches executed from 1984 to 1988. It proposed an ambiguous form of figuration where images are recalled through memory so as to convey the artist's emotional response to the subject rather than its appearance in an objective sense.

The atmosphere of particular places has consistently altered the course of Ohtake's art. During the 1980s he worked mostly in Tokyo, where he created large-scale paintings teeming with appeopriated images and with the conflicting energies of the Shinjuku district in which he was living. His decision in early 1988 to make his home in the remote rural location of Shikoku brought with it a dramatic change in his work that was directly related to the texture of the place and specifically to the recreation of a physical sense of that peaceful seaside environment. In sculptures assembled from driftwood and found objects, and in gouaches and prints in which ambiguous images seem to have been flung impulsively onto the surface, he captured a sense of the elemental forces of nature that contrasted remarkably with the urban quality of his previous work but remained consistent with his obsession with a sense of place...cont.

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