10 Robin Tenison’s devotion to the place, which brought all kinds of scientific attention to it, it’s now a UNESCO World Heritage site. But all around it, the trees have been completely cut down for palm oil. There’s just a few hundred square miles of exquisite rain forest left alone. But no doubt, if the pressure was great enough, it would be exploited for something. When I was there, I could feel the pressure on to make it more tourist-friendly. . . . Anyway, if my work is some small argument about how extraordinarily exqui- site these places are, that would be a great thing.” At a cultural moment when digital technology has made the capture and dissemination of images effort- less, even automatic, and therefore increasingly trivial and fugitive, Foster’s handmade observational art has a philosophical force—the force of redescription, not merely of description. “I’m not interested in accuracy. I don’t think that’s a particularly interesting thing for an artist to pursue. I’m trying to be truthful.” (His saying that reminded me of a statement by Richard Avedon: “All photographs are accurate. None is the truth.”) Foster’s art is a notation of the experience of seeing, not a mere inventory of appearances. Hence the need that he feels to supplement his work with written diaries. “That’s another discipline,” he said. “To sit at night in your tent and write your diary. There are times when you really don’t want to. You’re tired, it’s wet, it’s cold, but you have to do it every day or there’s no point to it really. It has to be what you saw and felt during the day. . . . They’re a very important compo- nent of the work. They only appear as a few lines under a painting, but those lines are distilled from huge experiences . . . thoughts you had, things you observed. If a tapir comes bounding through the jungle, you can’t paint that, but you want to have a record of it.” Foster generally works in solitude but seldom trav- els without friends, guides, or experts, who may be one and the same. “I’ve been very fortunate in my working life to have traveling companions who were brilliant at being outdoors and loved adventures,” he said. “I’ve always managed to find someone to come with me who knows exactly what they’re doing and is prepared to spend a week, a month or three months traveling with me in order to help me get what I want to do. I’ve learned a lot from them, so in the last few years I’ve felt quite prepared to organize these trips myself and invite people along who know less about these places than I do. There have been a couple of occasions when I’ve been in situations where absolute catastrophes could have happened. . . . I’ve often been in that posi- tion, but by now I have a much better sense of what to expect. . . . I like to feel that I open myself to whatever’s going to happen, and similarly I open myself to what- ever subject I’m going to paint. I try never to look at photographs of places I’m going to because I want to be open to whatever it is I’m going to find.” Foster has immersed himself in situations of extreme density, such as the Borneo jungle, and of almost lunar barrenness, such as the Atacama Desert in South America, which has seen no rain in a century and a half. “The idea of going to the Atacama Desert to find something to paint is kind of odd really,” he said, “because it’s the bleakest place in the world. But if you hunt around, you will find something. I’ve never yet been to a place where I couldn’t find something to paint.” Foster admits to having felt, in his early years of wilderness work, a concern for his adventurer com- panions that could result in creative failure. “Years ago, when I was traveling with friends, I felt sort of responsible for all the time I spent wandering about looking for the right subject. Once when I was trave- ling in the White Mountains in California, I sat there and worked on a piece for six days, and then I finally stood back and thought, ‘this will never make a paint- ing.’ It was just because I’d sort of snatched at the subject, thinking I’d better find something quick. You don’t have to have that happen too many times before you realize that you’ve got to find the right subject before you commit yourself to it. . . . Where I’ve been defeated is where I’ve made the wrong start, but I don’t have many duds, really.” Drawing is the foundation of Foster’s practice, and his habit, having chosen a landscape vantage point, is to set up his drawing board, which has to be leveled and stabilized against winds and other elements, and leave it, camping as nearby as practical. He never uses a camera, even as a mnemonic device. “If you stare at something”—a vista—“for eight or nine hours a day for ten days, you remember it pretty well . . . it’s in there pretty deep,” he said. Anyway, no camera could capture his true quarry: the feeling of being in a wild place. A couple of days’ observation will enable Foster to decide the time of day when light best enhances the character of his chosen subject and vantage point, and subsequent days’ work at a site will hinge on those hours. “Once you’ve set it at that time,” he said, “then that’s the logic of the work.” What Foster brings back to his studio are “more than field notes,” he said. “They certainly look like paintings, but the process in the studio is one of strengthening and making the foreground come for- ward and the background go back and so on. . . . I find sometimes that I have to change my mind about the appropriateness of what I intended. Sometimes it’s a matter of something as radical as what I thought the focal point was. The work in the studio is not just about finishing things. It’s more about resolving the thing to make it work as a work of art.” Look at one of Foster’s images of jungle thicket and you recognize both the impossibility of its correspond- ing to what he saw, down to every leaf and tendril, and his remarkable knack for infusing description with challenges to the eye apposite to those that he faced
