The Majestic Work of Takao Tanabe

You will be hard-pressed to find evidence of humans in most of Takao Tanabe’s paintings. Sure, it may be a bit lonely, even bleak, but it’s also a huge source of relief; after all, people are a lot. And sometimes their absence is strangely beautiful.

On the centenary year of Tanabe’s life (the Japanese Canadian painter celebrates his hundredth birthday on Sept. 16), the Audain Art Museum in Whistler has organized two exhibitions of the artist’s work. Vistas: From Takao Tanabe’s Travels opened earlier in the spring and is a collection of Tanabe’s paintings from his peregrinations around the globe, spanning landscapes as wide-ranging as the English seaside and Machu Picchu.

The second part of the exhibition, Takao Tanabe 100: Inside Passage takes its title from a landscape slightly closer to home. Inside Passage refers to the coastal waters and islands that separate mainland British Columbia from the Pacific Ocean. The title can also be read to evoke the interior journey that artists undertake to find their subjects and, arguably, themselves.

From the 60 paintings in Inside Passage, different kinds of journeys emerge.

One is self-evident in every sense of the word. It incorporates Tanabe’s experiences, aesthetic periods and developments, his honours and awards, his milestones and accomplishments.

Another is more ambiguous. It is the path that runs alongside any human life, the places that embed in our imagination, the time spent on the earth itself in all its ordinary and ongoing magnificence.

An art practice informed by internment, displacement

The ultimate journey, perhaps, is the one that takes leave from the body to become another way of looking, seeing and understanding — of taking one’s place in the greater planetary cycles. In this, it’s fitting that the firefly existence of humans isn’t much reflected in Tanabe’s work.

The mountains, ocean, forests and shores will endure long after we’re gone, and that is a comforting thing.

In the hefty publication that accompanies Inside Passage, four essays from writers and curators Steven McNeil, Jonathan Shaughnessy, Kiriko Watanabe and Sherri Kajiwara lay out the timelines and biographical details of the artist’s life and work, covering his creative evolutions and influences alongside the development of the Canadian art community itself.

Tanabe was born in 1926 in Seal Cove, a small community that is now part of Prince Rupert, B.C. The fifth of seven children, his family made a living from fishing and cannery work.

The Tanabe family moved to Vancouver just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. After the attack at Pearl Harbour, the Canadian government instituted an internment program for Japanese Canadians, relocating more than 21,000 people from their homes on the Pacific coast.

Tanabe and his family spent time at the infamous Hastings Park processing centre in Vancouver before they were sent to Lemon Creek in the West Kootenays.

When the war ended in 1945, Japanese Canadians were given the option of either resettling east of the Rocky Mountains or facing exile back to Japan as part of their continued government-mandated dispersal.

After his family moved to Winnipeg, the teenage Tanabe was forced to leave high school to help support his family. In hopes of getting work, he initially enrolled at the Winnipeg School of Art to study sign painting. After observing an evening drawing class, he sought entrance to the wider program, studying painting, drawing and sculpture.

In his time at Winnipeg School, Tanabe met his lifelong mentor and friend Joseph Plaskett. The relationship would prove instrumental in significant ways. Not only did Plaskett introduce the young Tanabe to a diversity of artists and creative methodologies, but he was also a continued source of support and encouragement.

The events of Tanabe’s life have been well-documented in books and film. He had periods of study in New York, London and Japan. He spent time at the Banff Centre for the Arts, then returned to Canada’s West Coast. There are scholarships and awards founded in his name. All the way through, he kept trying different ideas, finding new ways of making work.

The creative periods of the artist’s life are given fullest flower in the Audain exhibition, moving from abstraction into hard-edged style, and then finally the large-scale landscapes for which he is best known.

‘Not simply observed, but deeply felt’

“Ultimately, his visual language emerges from a lifetime of observation and study, grounded in a personal response to the wide variety of art he has seen as well as the land he has visited,” wrote the Audain Art Museum’s Gail & Stephen A. Jarislowsky chief curator Kiriko Watanabe in her essay “The Artistic Journey.”

“In Tanabe’s paintings, the vast stillness of the Pacific Northwest is not simply observed, but deeply felt. From a distance, his compositions offer a sense of quiet majesty; up close, they unfold in layers — a myriad of waves that gently pulse, muted tones that shift with light, and brushwork that reveals a disciplined yet expressive hand.”

I can attest to the truth of this. Left alone in the gallery for a few moments with the paintings, my first inclination was to get up close, parking my nose mere centimetres to see how Tanabe did what he did.

It’s a curious experience to witness how the work shifts with proximity and perspective. Stand a few metres away, and a painting like Rivers 1/01: Jordan River from 2001 is a near-photorealist depiction. Step up close, and it shifts to a fractal creation of lines and dots of pale colour that coalesce into not only an evocation of place, but also of feeling.

This kind of alchemy, the ability to conjure both atmosphere and emotion, feels like magic but it is the product of discipline and precise technique.

In Tanabe’s paintings, the horizon is a throughline, whether in his earlier depictions of prairie vistas or the later work that captured the many moods of sea and sky on the West Coast.

The demarcation between two things, sky and earth, ocean and air, surfaces with metronomic, almost obsessive commitment.

It is this line that speaks to the deepest level of Tanabe’s impact: it’s in the transitional space, or maybe the instant, in which solidity dissolves, melting into thin air.

It’s fleeting, ephemeral but also weighty and imbued with a kind of gravitas, all at the same time.

A master painter. And a cool uncle

Tanabe’s profundity doesn’t mean humour doesn’t occasionally pop up in his work.

Co-curator Watanabe explains that the Emperor painting series, made in the mid-1960s, caused something of a ruckus when viewers took one look at the phallic shapes in the work, and assumed they were obscene. But Watanabe notes they more resemble breakfast food than penises.

If you look again, indeed there it is, jam on toasts, eggs and other more edible references. Tanabe supposedly found the episode extremely funny.

In addition to his paintings and creative output, Tanabe was a builder, happy to support other artists through the establishment of awards and scholarships, but also equally adept in picking up a hammer and banging together studio spaces.

In her essay Through a Nikkei Lens, Sherri Kajiwara explains how the early events of Tanabe’s life informed his approach to art, and how they shaped him as a person.

“If institutions know him as Takao Tanabe, family know him as Uncle Tak,” Kajiwara writes. “The cool uncle with the granny glasses, fatigue jackets and sandals, carrying cloth bags long before environmentalism was common.”

Kajiwara makes the point that it was the hardship and suffering that Tanabe’s family faced that cemented his commitment to helping others.

“From a Nikkei perspective, Tanabe’s life mirrors the trajectory of his community: internment, dispersal, rebuilding, recognition. His landscapes, expansive yet quiet, are meditations on absence and belonging,” she writes.

“Their minimalism reflects endurance. His generosity demonstrates an ethic of community care. Above all, his voice insists: art is not optional but necessary — a mode of survival.”

It was a curious experience driving up to Whistler to visit the Audain Art Museum. The trip offers landscapes that are similar to Tanabe’s paintings.

It is a reminder, yet again, that artists are perpetually reacting to the time and place of their being, moving through periods of experimentation and practice to reveal the things that most endure.

Even 100 years feel scant in understanding this process.

‘Takao Tanabe 100: Inside Passage’ is on display at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler until Oct. 19.