Takao Tanabe was born in 1926 in the small fishing village of Seal Cove, now part of Prince Rupert, in northern British Columbia. He spent his early years in the province and became intimately familiar with the changing weather of the West Coast. His family was of Japanese descent and during the Second World War, along with thousands of others, they were removed from the Coast and sent to internment camps in the Interior.
After the war, Tanabe moved to Winnipeg, where he worked in a variety of jobs before enrolling in the Winnipeg School of Art. There Tanabe encountered the young Joseph Plaskett, who taught at the school after his studies in New York. Initially Tanabe was an abstract painter, but he always maintained a deep interest in the landscape. Following travels in Europe and Japan and a long residence in New York, Tanabe returned to Canada. He spent several years leading the Banff School of Fine Arts, from which he retired in 1980. Returning to his native province, he eventually built a home in Errington, on Vancouver Island.
The return to the province of his birth meant that his focus shifted from the sparse landscape of the Prairies to the atmospheric environs of the West Coast. Tanabe went on to develop an approach to the coastal landscape that was distinctly his own. Tanabe’s images wrapped in grey mists, almost always without any trace of human presence, depict a BC coast more enigmatic and richly varied than the work of any other artist.
His deeply insightful manner of depicting the landscape has been honed over many years. While he photographs the land extensively and sometimes draws directly from it, Tanabe’s canvases are always produced away from a direct confrontation with the landscape. This allows him the time to refine his compositions and to paint in a direct and subtly expressive way. For Tanabe, a successful canvas will convey the expansive and subtle beauty of his subject through paint that seems to float onto the canvas. He works with the canvas upon a flat surface, applying colour through multiple thin coats of paint.
In Q.C.I. 4/84: A Grey Day in the Channel, differences between the richly varied surface of the ocean and the cloudy sky emerge as we study the painting. The brush-strokes delineating the ocean’s surface are distinct in colour, suggesting the gentle movement of the currents below. The distant islands, partially hidden in the cloudy atmosphere, are given substance by Tanabe’s subtle reflections of their forms on the ocean surface. It is indeed “a grey day in the channel,” but the variety of Tanabe’s brushwork, and his remarkable command of ocean and atmosphere, ensure that this “grey day” is far from a dull one.
In 1984, Tanabe did three distinct series of paintings of the Queen Charlotte Islands (now Haida Gwaii). This canvas is the fourth work in the series titled with the abbreviation Q.C.I. The descriptive part of the title—A Grey Day in the Channel—aptly describes the weather but understates the visual poetry of the painting. A distinct and rewarding vision of the coastal waters of British Columbia, this canvas clearly demonstrates that Tanabe is one of Canada’s most original landscape artists.
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.