Rivers 2/00: Crooked River 2000

While Tanabe is known primarily for his majestic images of the coast, from 2000 to 2001, the artist decided to embark on a series of six paintings that took the rivers of British Columbia as their subjects. These complex works, including Rivers 2/00: Crooked River, are the result of lengthy trips to the interior of the province, where he documented significant sites with his camera and then returned to his Vancouver Island studio to paint them. The composition of Rivers 2/00 differs from some of the other paintings in the series, such as Rivers 1/01: Jordan River, 2001, in that the body of water is seen in middle-ground and is a less assertive element within the composition. Tanabe devotes attention to the dark foreground rather than to the river itself or to the luminous cloud-strewn sky. The whole composition is bathed in a cool, revealing light, and everywhere the eye goes there is something to delight and interest. We feel as if we are there by the banks of the Crooked River, a small stream in northern British Columbia whose waters eventually flow into the Peace River. What more could a viewer ask of a landscape painting?

Though Tanabe is still working with the canvas on a horizontal plane, as he did previously with his prairie and coastal paintings, his application of paint is different than that seen in The Dark Land 2/80, 1980, for example. Instead of reducing the landscape to its minimal elements, in Rivers 2/00 Tanabe creates a dense wealth of visual information on the canvas that is achieved by his repeated painting of the subject. This work required at least six different rounds of painting over several months to build up the dense and complex surface that the artist sought. At a distance the work appears almost as fundamental as the prairie pictures, but closer examination reveals that it encompasses a myriad, detailed world, and a densely complex pattern of brush strokes.

The work is derived from a photographic source—the starting point for Tanabe’s paintings. The process of deciding what is important within the image is a slow one, and part of the enormous planning that Tanabe brings to all his large-scale landscapes. The success of the work relies on his ability to take us into the world as he sees it. Of expansive scale, more than three metres wide, Rivers 2/00: Crooked River requires that the viewer join Tanabe in exploring the natural world.