Into the Wild
- Lucy Studley
- Jun 25
- 6 min read
Words by Lucy Studley A humble tin of watercolour paints has taken one Cornwall-based artist on a lifelong adventure. For the last 45 years, artist Tony Foster has embarked on epic ‘Journeys’ into the wild places of the world. Setting out from the village of Tywardreath, this gregarious but unpretentious figure makes his way to distant rainforests, mountains, and deserts, carrying his modest camping equipment and tiny tin of watercolours with him. When he eventually returns home from months in the wilderness, the people he meets walking the lanes and woods of South Cornwall – or at the local pub – would probably be surprised to discover that he is the only living British artist to have a museum in the US dedicated to his work. The Foster Museum in Palo Alto, California, brings together much of Tony’s oeuvre in one inspiring space, prompting fresh connections to both art and the natural world.
However, this summer Tony’s work will appear in his homeland of Cornwall at the start of a major new touring exhibition. Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery in Truro marks the jumping off point of this particular journey, as Exploring Time: A Painter’s Perspective by Tony Foster shows at the newly transformed museum from 5th July to 25th October. It will go on to the Royal Watercolour Society in London, and then to the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio and other venues across the United States.
Born in Lincolnshire, Tony began painting as a child. Later he moved to Fowey where he taught art, eventually finding the confidence to make painting his career. He discovered early on that watercolour was the right medium for him, a choice that was based on very practical concerns. “I knew the approach I wanted to take with my work, and that it would involve getting out into the wilderness to paint,” he explains. “With watercolours I can use a tiny and very light palette. The paper dries quickly and can be rolled up for transportation. And, because we trek and collect fresh water where we camp, each image is made of water from the place itself – simply with a little pigment added by me.”
The concept of journeys has formed the structure of his entire practice. Taking the notion of en plein air to the extreme, Tony’s process involves trekking, camping, and painting on location in some of the world’s most remote and often inhospitable environments for months at a time; just one large painting can take up to three weeks to complete on site.
Travelling slowly, on foot or by canoe or raft, Tony navigates landscapes of mountains and canyons, rainforests and deserts, from the Arctic to the Tropics. Everest, Greenland, Borneo, Guyana and the Galapagos Islands are among the many locations where Tony has painted over the years, but the American West is his most returned-to destination. Friends join him each time to help find the best places to set up his specially made, lightweight easel and to keep him company around the campfire at night.
The camaraderie is clearly something Tony loves, but his approach to making work has also caused hardship. Frostbite, altitude sickness, tropical diseases and insect bites have all been his bedfellows on these expeditions to remote places, and fittingly his trusty camping set-up itself forms part of the exhibition in Truro – an integral part of each epic ‘Journey’.
At the end of the excursion, paintings are stashed in an aluminium tube and transported back to Tony’s studio in Tywardreath for the finishing touches. Unusually for a landscape painter, he doesn’t take photos or make sketches, but he is an avid collector of ‘treasures’ and each work is anchored to its place of origin by the inclusion of found objects - a feather, shell, leaf, desert sand or melted glacial ice – some lines from his diary, or a small square of a map.
“I’ve always been a collector, ever since I was a child,” explains Tony. “The found objects which inhabit every wall or surface of my studio, and often feature as part of the works themselves, are an important link with all the places I’ve been and the people I’ve met.”
Tony’s watercolours reflect on the forces of nature and change in these wild places he travels to, his powers of close observation resulting in work which is academically valuable as well as sublimely beautiful. Hence his fellowship of the prestigious Royal Geographic Society and a list of international exhibitions which includes the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington. Indeed, his work echoes the role of historical herbaria held by the museum, in which early scientists like Emily Stackhouse preserved the ecology of a certain place at a certain time for posterity.
The concept for this exhibition, Exploring Time, was conceived as a reflection on the complexity of time and its impact on the planet. The idea came to Tony while painting on Everest in 2007, when a monk handed him an ammonite fossil found near the peak of the mountain. That Everest was once under the sea is well known, but holding the physical evidence in his hands had a profound impact on Tony.
Musing on the concept of time relative to humans, nature, and landscape gave Tony the structure for a new body of work. He considered how a unit of time might be the opening of a flower bud in the sun, the evolution of a Cornish hedge through the seasons, or a river gradually eroding through layers of rock. He realised that four decades of his particular artistic practice had left him almost uniquely positioned to explore time using different frames of reference: Geological, Biological, Human and Fleeting.
In ‘Geological Time,’ Tony shows how the history of huge movements of landmasses can be read in the landscape today – from the Himalayas rising from sea level to Dorset’s fossil-rich Jurassic Coast, and Cornwall’s folded granite peninsula threaded with its precious mineral deposits. Meanwhile, ‘Biological Time’ follows trees, hedges, meadows and woodland through the cycle of the seasons, for example examining a year in the life of a Cornish hedge or painting trees that are thousands of years old.
‘Human Time’ we might think of as a life span, or ‘within living memory’. This section includes Foster’s Lockdown Diaries inspired by daily walks in Cornwall during the pandemic, as well as images of rewilded places exploring how nature and our industrial past interacts in the landscape. Finally, in the section ‘Fleeting Moments,’ Tony captures brief moments in time, from studies of skies, lightning and weather, to moving water and the appearance of a rainbow. Such moments often hold a disproportionate power – vividly remembered for a lifetime, viscerally connecting us to the natural world, and reminding us of our ephemerality in the context of geological time.
Tony has as much in common with natural history documentary makers as his fellow landscape painters. “If my work helps people appreciate and value these amazing places then I’m using the best method at my disposal to further the cause of environmental preservation,” he says. “I believe that civilisation would be better measured, not by the area under landscaped lawns and driveways, but by the area we are prepared to leave alone.”
LEFT: Painting in Ilulissat looking across the Kangia Icefjord, Ilulissat, Greenland, 2001 - Photo: Peter Murray, courtesy The Foster Museum RIGHT: Mt Everest North Face, From Ocean Floor to Roof of the World, 45-50 Million Years, 2007 - Photo: Paul Mounsey, courtesy The Foster Museum
Exploring Time is a collection of work which is both painstakingly observed and profoundly beautiful. Foster’s proficient brushstrokes effortlessly capture extraordinary detail, while also adding sweeping grandeur to his paintings. It’s a combination which perfectly befits the monumental landscapes he paints, and threatens to make rewilding advocates of us all.
Exploring Time: A Painter’s Perspective by Tony Foster shows at Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery from 5th July to 25th October.
