A Hundred Years of Paying Attention
I saw Takao Tanabe 100: Inside Passage at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler last week, and I have not stopped thinking about the exhibition since. It marks Tanabe’s hundredth birthday, and it includes sixty-some paintings from six decades of his work.
Walking through the rooms felt less like witnessing an art show and more like watching one artist’s eye get sharper and sharper across a lifetime of creating. What struck me most wasn’t the subject of his paintings but how he painted them.
When I arrived, I knew nothing about him, but I quickly recognized that Tanabe didn’t land at these landscapes by accident. What I subsequently learned is that he spent his first two decades as an artist restlessly moving through different styles, as if testing which language could hold the message he wanted to transmit: loose abstraction first, then, bored with it by his own admission, hard-edge geometric abstracts. Afterwards, he spent a year in Japan studying sumi-e and calligraphy, a training that seemed to affect his craft substantially. He came back with what has been described as a “one-shot” method for his large-scale acrylic canvases, planting down color and form with a confidence that doesn’t leave room for correction. You can feel that discipline in the finished creations: nothing feels wasted or fussed over. Every brushstroke seems to have known exactly where it needed to land.
What that training produced, once he turned it toward landscape, is a kind of precision that leaves you speechless. Critics keep returning to the horizon line in his work, the place where sky meets water or water meets shore, and how exactly, how almost fanatically, he demonstrates that boundary. Stand close to one of his coastal paintings and you notice how much information is packed into what first reads as a wash of grey. He has said himself that he is drawn to the grey mists and rain-obscured islands, the weather that offers just enough detail to hold your interest without spelling everything out. That restraint is its own kind of victory. It takes real control to make emptiness feel full.
Once I stepped into Tanabe’s life history, I recognized the origin of that precision. He was born in 1926 in Seal Cove, a small fishing village near Prince Rupert, the son of a commercial fisherman, and he spent his childhood around water long before he painted it. In 1942, at the age of fifteen, his family was forcibly removed from the coast along with roughly 22,000 other Japanese Canadians, sent through a processing centre in Vancouver and then to an internment camp at Lemon Creek in the B.C. interior, where there was no school and no way to finish his education. He’s said that the anger from that experience stayed with him for thirty years. I began to wonder about the relationship between what had been taken from him and the way he later looked at the landscape. He had spent his childhood around water, had it taken away from him, and then spent decades returning to it through his work. I can’t know whether one had anything to do with the other, but standing there, looking at those paintings, it was difficult not to feel the connection.
What followed me out of the museum and into the rest of my week, a week I’d already spent thinking deeply about what it means to be fully present, to actually participate in my own life instead of moving through it half-attentive.
We take an enormous amount of scenery and impressions every day and retain almost none of them. We glance at a waterfall long enough to photograph it, not long enough to actually see it. Tanabe’s Inside Passage paintings are what happens when someone refuses to do that. To paint water with that kind of photographic accuracy, you can’t be thinking about the next thing. You are fully alive, fully present, fully participating, watching the specific way the light falls on this particular morning, aware that it will never look exactly this way again. That’s clearly not just a technical skill. It is devotion to presence. Every canvas I saw was a testimonial to his presence in the creative space, for however many hours it took, completely there. To look that carefully at something is to give it your attention, and attention may be one of the most intimate things we can give.
When something has been taken from you once, maybe you stop taking anything for granted. You look at things like they might not be there tomorrow, because you know, firsthand, that it might not be. I wonder how to cultivate this type of presence without loss having to teach it to me first.
What moved me while standing in the gallery was watching someone spend a hundred years getting more and more precise about how to translate his feelings into landscapes. That kind of precision doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen quickly. It is the result of decades of showing up, looking intently, and refusing to let the work be anything less than true to what he actually observed.
I left thinking less about art and more about my own week, my own unremarkable Tuesdays, and how rarely I give them the kind of attention Tanabe gave a single stretch of coastline. We are so accustomed to waiting for something important to happen that we can miss the strange fact that our lives are mostly made of things that don’t announce themselves as important: a Tuesday morning with a cup of coffee and a conversation we’ve had a hundred times and light coming through the window in a particular way that will never quite happen again.
This is what I mean when I say I want to participate more. It is not about becoming more productive, more mindful, or better at being present. It is simply about no longer treating the ordinary parts of my life as if they are less worthy of my attention.
To actually be in the moments I am in, instead of already halfway to the next one.
Tanabe spent decades refining his ability to see. I am pondering whether we can spend our lives refining our ability to live.
This is another kind of precision: setting aside the imagined life, the anticipated life, the life we're waiting to begin, and finally seeing the one we're actually in. This Tuesday. This particular light. This particular person sitting across from us. This particular moment that will never come again. It made me want to court my own life, the way you’d court a long-lost lover.
