5 In Tony’s own words, “I have drawn my inspira- tion from the sublime beauty of the wilderness.” Exploring Beauty: Watercolour Diaries from the Wild brings together landscapes from his travels around the world to provide a resounding endorsement of that inspiration. He has done so with the help of “luminar- ies”: rather than choosing the subjects himself, he appealed to a number of individuals to name what are for them the most beautiful places on earth. It is a distinguished list that includes former directors of the Department of Plant Biology at the Carnegie Institution for Science and of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; professors of astronomy and geology; and well-known writers, adventurers, and environ- mentalists. A significant number of them, like Bill Brace and Annie and Bill Vanderbilt, have accompa- nied Tony on some of his more arduous journeys, as willing if at times wary participants in his forays into wilderness. In a sense, then, there are more than one pair of eyes involved here, although it is to one in par- ticular, Tony’s, that we are indebted. To paraphrase Confucius, “everything has beauty, but not everyone F or more than thirty years Tony Foster has scaled the heights and plumbed the depths of planet earth. He has done so as an artist who has, unusually in modern times, mastered that tradi- tional medium of the itinerant painter out-of-doors, watercolour. Like his illustrious predecessors, he knows both its advantages and its limitations. On the one hand, it is portable. The pigments are water-soluble, and the support, paper, is light. On the other, it is unstable: a few drops of rain (not to men- tion a blizzard) can wash away hours of labour and reduce the paper to pulp. Even the finished product is a fragile thing, susceptible to fading in strong light and reacting unfavourably to changes in temperature and humidity. Yet Tony appears to relish the challenges. No one else to my knowledge has ever attempted to unfurl seven feet of paper, four feet high, in front of some of the most intractable subjects a landscape painter can attempt—on the rim of the Grand Canyon, for instance, or at an altitude of 17,600 feet in the Himalayas, looking toward the summit of Mount Everest. It begs the question, why? Introduction Duncan Robinson FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, USA, AND THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM, CAMBRIDGE, UK, AND MASTER OF MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE (2002–12) My hunch is that what comes next will be something completely different. . . . The theme might be more intellectual than physical . . . more of a concept, really. —Tony Foster in conversation with John Halkes (2007) Tony Foster and Penan tribesman Nyapun share a laugh together, Mulu, Borneo, February/March 2015
