Inside Passage: Queen Charlotte Strait, 1998

Inside Passage: Queen Charlotte Strait is an outstanding composition by Takao Tanabe, synonymous with the best of his coastal works, and among the finest by any Canadian artist painting over the Pacific.

Takao Tanabe is described as, “one of the country’s foremost landscape painters” [1] by Ian Thom in the Art Canada Institute's Takao Tanabe, Life and Work. As a general overview of Tanabe's contribution to Canadian art, in his important biographical and curatorial text, Thom continued: "Although [Takao Tanabe's]  early years were characterized by his focus on abstraction, he went on to produce paintings that changed the way Canadians viewed the Prairies and the Pacific coast." [2]

Addressing a significant transition in Tanabe’s approach to painting when he returned to the West Coast from the Prairies in 1980, Ian Thom observed that Tanabe "became fascinated with the idea of what he referred to as the 'layered landscape' and was drawn to how light is rendered in British Columbia’s coastal environment." [3]

Reflecting on how he has responded to this in his work, Tanabe says that, 'The west coast has its bright, clear days where all is revealed, but the views I favour are the grey mists, the rain obscured islands and the clouds that hide the details... The typical weather of the coast is like that, just enough detail revealed to make it interesting but not so clear as to be banal or overwhelming.' For Tanabe, an ideal painting of the coast is one obscured by ambient details; an image that does not put everything out in the open, but invites deeper contemplation. [4]

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Footnotes:

[1] Ian Thom, Takao Tanabe: Life and Work (Art Canada Institute, 2023), 52.

[2] Ibid., 63.

[3] Ibid., 66.

[4] Ibid., 67.