PROVENANCE
Equinox Gallery, Vancouver, 1988
Private Estate, Vancouver

Following his permanent return to his native British Columbia in 1980, Takao Tanabe began to explore the landscape of the province. He explored BC extensively and was particularly drawn to the coast. Although Tanabe was very conscious of the active industry that occurred along the coast, he had little interest in depicting it in his work. Indeed, when one considers how often the scenes he painted were only visible from a boat on the water, it is surprising that a boat hardly ever appears in his work.

Tanabe’s approach was in marked contrast to that of fellow painter E.J. Hughes, who rarely omitted signs of human activity from his paintings. Tanabe, in comparison, very rarely includes any evidence of human presence in his work, but all of his painting is shaped by a decisive view—his own. Works such as Inside Passage 2/88: View to Porcher Island are based on photographs Tanabe took while traveling around the province.

At first glance, Inside Passage 2/88 seems relatively simple, but this apparent simplicity belies the carefully considered work by Tanabe to develop the composition. The image is a vista across dark ocean water to the light-flooded shapes of the islands mid-composition and the luminous sky above. The contrast between the deeply coloured ocean of the foreground, the brighter islands and the opalescent sky is striking. This shift in colour encourages a shift in emotion that is also striking. The eye is carried across the dark waters to linger on the complexity of the islands, which define both the mid-ground and background. The whole composition is united by the sweeping, cloud-filled sky, which draws the eye into the distant horizon beyond Porcher Island (likely the island on the right). The shift in brightness from the darker foreground to the brighter background further encourages the viewer’s eye to explore the distant landscape.

Porcher Island is in Hecate Strait, southwest of the city of Prince Rupert. Although it has an extremely small population, the approximately 200-square-mile island is one of the largest on the BC coast. The fact that Tanabe has painted it as a bulky mass, mid-ground, at the right side of the composition, allows him to suggest both the enormous scale and the splendour of the BC coast. This work, like many of Tanabe’s coastal images, brilliantly conveys both the beauty and the expansiveness of the west coast. We, the viewers, are infinitely small in scale compared to this impressive landscape. A combination of rugged coastlines, broad waters and magnificent skies, this landscape is, as Tanabe’s painting vividly reveals, one of the most beautiful in the world.

Tanabe’s title, Inside Passage 2/88: View to Porcher Island, includes much information: the location within the northern reaches of the Inside Passage approaching Porcher Island and the fact that this painting is the second in his Inside Passage series of 1988. What the title does not suggest is the majesty of the artist’s landscape subject or the wonder of Tanabe’s ability to capture it.

We thank Ian M. Thom, Senior Curator—Historical at the Vancouver Art Gallery from 1988 to 2018, for contributing the above essay. Thom is the author of several Tanabe publications, including Takao Tanabe: Life & Work, published in 2024.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars