Takao Tanabe has contributed to the visual landscape of Canada for more than seven decades. He is an accomplished printmaker and a painter and has also served as an important arts educator and advocate. Tanabe was born near Prince Rupert on British Columbia’s northern coast, far from any major art centres. The small village of Seal Cove was primarily a fishing town and packing centre, and at the time a largely Japanese Canadian community. The distinct atmosphere of coastal British Columbia and all its natural glory would become an important influence in Tanabe’s realist art from the 1980s to the present day. While he has explored various styles and subject matter over his storied career, the depictions of his home province are arguably his most celebrated contributions to Canadian art.

Barkley Sound 4/93 is powerful yet serene image, almost whispered on to the canvas. The realist paintings of coastal BC are first based on Tanabe’s personal photographs or sketching outdoors, then painted in the studio. Barkley Sound is physically located south of Ucluelet and north of Bamfield on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia and forms the entrance to the Alberni Inlet. It is a wild and remote area, where the land, ocean and sky are ever-expansive and all-encompassing. To sensitively capture in paint the atmospheric activity of the ocean and its many mood swings, as Tanabe does so successfully, an artist must have seen, smelled and experienced the Pacific Ocean. Tanabe captures the enchanting and awe-inspiring landscape in this painting, the viewer sitting on the gentle, rolling ocean, at the base of this magisterial environment.

Tanabe’s life and work was the focus of a major retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in 2005, among many other accomplishments and accolades.