A child of the ocean that his work is so closely associated with, Tanabe was born Takao Izumi in the small village of Seal Cove, British Columbia, the fifth of seven children. His father, Naojiro, was a commercial fisherman and his mother, Tomie, worked in a canning plant. Over the next 100 years, he would establish one of the most celebrated careers in Canadian art, creating a legacy that is inspired and innovative but also consistent—patience has been at the core of his approach to artmaking.
As a boy, Tanabe spent summers fishing along the Skeena River and exploring nearby forests. In 1937 his family moved to Vancouver. Tanabe was dazzled by the urban center, immersing himself in movies and popular music and integrating into the broader society. However, as a young teenager, his life was upended by the forced relocation of his family to an internment camp for Japanese Canadians at Lemon Creek, a farmer’s field in West Kootenay, BC. From there he would spend a short time with his brothers as an indentured labourer in a sugar beet farm in Manitoba. Despite this early hardship, one that systematically displaced and deprived him and his family of agency, Tanabe would be determined to forge his own path, expressed in life and art. As his friend and author, Jane Rule said of him 50 years ago,
“The authority of his work is the claim he has laid on it to be a primary commitment of his life, wherever he is. He has also claimed Canada, a decision no other institution or region could have brought him to. It is his own singular vision that has brought him home to the large landscapes across this large land that are his.”
– Jane Rule
Tanabe’s philosophy towards painting, if it can be said he has one, is of unsentimental practicality. His career developed through dedicated study and resourcefulness, varied in where it took him. From workshops with Joseph Plaskett at the Winnipeg School of Art, to instruction in New York with Hans Hoffman that would inform his hard-edge era, to Vancouver where his affinity for typographic layout and design led him to establish Periwinkle Press, to the Tokyo University of Fine Arts where he learned traditional sumi-e and calligraphy, techniques that influenced the restraint and discipline of his landscape paintings. A period in Alberta in the 1970s marked the start of his evolution from abstract to landscape artist. In 1980 he settled on the West Coast, the site of some of his most celebrated paintings. Tanabe is an objective, exacting observer, but also an introspective one: the mysteriousness of the landscape is always there.
“The West Coast has its bright days where all is revealed, but the views I favour are the grey mists, the rain obscured islands and the clouds that hide the detail. However much we desire order and clarity in all the details of our lives, there are always unexpected events that cloud and change our course. Life is ragged. 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. It can be a metaphor for life.”
– Takao Tanabe
Tanabe has been an influential figure in shaping several Canadian institutions and has sought to raise the profile of younger and lesser-known artists throughout his career. He was central to the revitalization of the Banff Centre of the Arts in the 1970s and was instrumental in the creation of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2000 and lobbied to see the work of BC artists recognized with the establishment of the Audain Prize in the Visual Arts in 2004. Ten years ago, he created the Tanabe Prize for BC Painters, administered by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. The Tanabe Prize is an annual award given to artists whose primary medium is painting and who are residents of British Columbia. “I wanted the prize to recognize an artist in British Columbia, where I have lived and worked for most of my life.”
By Anu Henderson, AGGV Partnership Specialist
The AGGV holds 46 artworks by Takao Tanabe in its collection. Sails is currently featured in the AGGV’s Permanent Collection Galleries, A View From Here.
A selection of Tanabe works from the AGGV collection will be displayed in Takao Tanabe 100: Inside Passage, co-organized by the Audain Art Museum, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. The exhibition opens in Victoria on May 29, 2027.
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Feature Image: Takao Tanabe in his studio, 1980. Photo by Garth Henderson
