Malacca Strait: Dawn 2004

Although Tanabe is predominantly known as a painter, he has had a rich career as both a draughtsman and a printmaker. His earliest prints date from his studies at the Winnipeg School of Art in the late 1940s and he has produced prints throughout his career. Always keen to explore new aesthetic ideas, he has used silkscreen, etching, monotype, lithography, woodblock, and various combinations of media. The subjects of his prints include an early self-portrait, dynamic abstractions—which suggest unusual spatial configurations—and more recently, as seen here, the landscape.

Malacca Strait: Dawn is perhaps Tanabe’s most ambitious print and a tour de force of the printmaker’s art. This work references two of his paintings, Inside Passage 3/98: In Malacca Pass, 1998, and Inside Passage 1/04: Malacca Strait, 2004. Though the printed image resembles the latter of these paintings most closely, albeit in reverse, in this print Tanabe has chosen to dramatically enhance the effects in the sky. Where there is an evocative but modest orange-pink blush in the right of the painting, in the print the whole of the sky is suffused with a dramatic and emotive pink glow, which is echoed in the reflections on the waters of the Malacca Strait.  The reading of the image is quite different than the canvas and demonstrates how much care has gone into the print.

One of the glories of the painting is the remarkable rendering of the variegated ripples on the surface of the water. For the print, Tanabe needed to work extensively on the massive plate, creating a network of etched lines that emulate but do not copy the shimmering surface of the sea in the painting. The sky is depicted using an aquatint plate to give the richer texture Tanabe sought, while the woodblocks provide the subtlety of colour and ethereality of water.

As the largest print Tanabe has made—the image being over one and a half metres in width—Malacca Strait: Dawn is one-half the scale of the canvas (Inside Passage 1/04: Malacca Strait) and required collaboration with a number of partners. Tanabe worked for several years with the master printer Peter Braune of New Leaf Editions in Vancouver, a company that specializes in intaglio printing processes. Requiring plates and woodblocks, the image was printed on a sheet of paper larger than the presses of New Leaf could provide, and so Tanabe and Braune used the presses at Capilano College (now Capilano University) in North Vancouver to complete the work. The precision required in the printing was demanding and there are only fifteen prints in the complete edition, although there are several trial proofs, artist’s proofs, and printer’s proofs. Braune sums up the arduous process of its creation as “one of the most challenging prints I have done.”

To say that this image is magisterial is an understatement. The enhanced drama that you see in the artist’s painting Dawn, 2003, is still present, but this print is richer. Malacca Strait: Dawn is an image that gives succour to the mind and spirit and is an appropriate work to represent Tanabe’s exceptional career as a printmaker.