Strait of Georgia 1/90: Raza Pass 1990

Strait of Georgia 1/90: Raza Pass is one of the finest of Tanabe’s coastal works, even though it is extremely difficult to choose a single work to represent this remarkable series of paintings. Reviewing the Tanabe retrospective in 2006, critic Robin Laurence wrote, “it’s almost impossible to look at Tanabe’s heroic landscape paintings without acknowledging their romantic grandeur.”  This is certainly true of this majestic work.

Raza Pass or Passage is a stretch of water off the island of the same name at the northern end of the Strait of Georgia. In common with many of Tanabe’s landscapes of the West Coast, this is an image wreathed in mist. We are placed high above the water and look into an empty but profoundly rich landscape. The composition leads your eye into the distance, an effect that is accomplished by subtly lightening the colour of the ocean’s surface as it recedes. The overlapping islands move from dark to light, brilliantly marking a visual and psychological journey.  With this and other coastal works, the artist makes a dramatic shift from the way he approached his prairie subjects—the paint is applied more slowly and methodically, but the results never seem laboured.

By 1980, Tanabe felt that he had accomplished what he could at the Banff School of Fine Arts and wanted to return to British Columbia where he was born. Even though he had not lived in B.C. for more than a dozen years, he was still gripped by its geography. Tanabe and his new partner, Anona Thorne, whom he had met in Banff, moved to an acreage near Parksville, on Vancouver Island, and began to build a house and studio. The studio was ready in 1982 and that year saw the artist begin a series of canvases of West Coast landscapes, work that continues to the present (although Tanabe has travelled to the B.C. Interior and elsewhere in Canada and the world).

One of the realities of living on Vancouver Island is that you often travel to the mainland by ferry. This was true for Tanabe and Thorne, who began making regular trips across the Strait of Georgia on the B.C. Ferries. Tanabe never travels without a camera, and he took many images on these journeys, upon which the paintings in the series are based.

Although many of Tanabe’s coastal landscapes, such as Inside Passage 1/89: Burke Channel, 1989, are not peopled, they have an intimacy to them that is not seen in the equally empty vistas rendered by Group of Seven member Lawren S. Harris (1885–1970). This is likely due to the richness of Tanabe’s atmospherics, “the damp grey light of the coast.”  As with Tanabe’s images of the prairie, Strait of Georgia 1/90: Raza Pass is an authentic vision of coastal British Columbia. Few artists can claim to have so completely captured two such diverse topographies.