7 effectively than Peter Lanyon in the paintings he based on what he saw from his glider, as he looked down from above onto the contours of that ancient land- scape. Yet even there, in the sweeping airborne curves of his semi-abstracts, there is a suggestion of imper- manence, of a landscape aging more slowly but just as surely as we ourselves do with the passage of time. As the critic Adrian Stokes observed, in Cornwall the fusion of landscape, history, and art is all-pervasive. Talking to Tony about his work, you are immedi- ately struck by his modest acceptance of his own human limitations: “you are just a molecule on a gnat’s eyelash when it comes to these enormous subjects.” In his conversation with John Halkes he went on to add that at work in the field “I am also confronted by geological time—thinking of the eons that were involved in making that landscape and the insignifi- cance of yourself sitting there day after day trying to depict it with pigments and water and pencil!” But as John noted, Tony is a born communicator who never loses sight of the wider implications of what he paints. Eventually erosion takes its toll on stone just as surely as global warming contributes to the melting of gla- ciers and chain saws rip their deadly way through rainforests. Those packets containing volcanic dust or seeds, the leaves, twigs, bones, and feathers he either attaches or represents, all of them refer implicitly to the different cycles of life on earth, animate and inani- mate, to which we are temporary witnesses. In his quest for beauty in the wildernesses and around the edges of the world, Tony reminds us constantly of time as well as space, of our own journeys through life. Is that perhaps an inevitable consequence of beauty, as it was for Keats confronted by a Grecian urn? If so, then maybe after all: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” explorer and the keen eye of the naturalist. The bigger the subject, the more detail he includes in the margi- nalia, from found objects (a bird’s feather, a book of El Capitan matches carelessly discarded by a passer-by) to his exquisite watercolour miniatures of the flora and fauna specific to his location. He never paints the human inhabitants of his landscapes, but they are often poignantly present; in the stone arrowheads he observed on the floor of the Grand Canyon, in the silk khatas given to him by Tibetan monks, so that his pictures not only record his experiences but also are “a way of bringing together the history of the land and my journey through it.” “All of my work is about journeys” has become something of a catchphrase for Tony, but it remains fundamentally true, regardless of the distance trav- elled. I am bemused by the fact that to this anthology, Exploring Beauty, he added as his contribution “places of breathtaking beauty that can be found by walking for an hour or two from my own back door.” Is it a coincidence that there is nowhere in the British Isles that conveys a stronger sense of the past than Cornwall, with its dolmens and standing stones reminding us of prehistory, with its rocky promonto- ries referring to geologic time? As Tony knows from his time as an arts officer in the region, the Cornish landscape and its coastline were sources of inspiration for artists throughout the twentieth century, from the Newlyn School, which flourished at the century’s inception, to the painters who congregated in St Ives after Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth settled there at its midpoint, softening their geometric abstractions with the irregular forms of land and sea. Later no one evoked the topography of Cornwall more Tony Foster painting in Deer Cave, Mulu, Borneo, February/March 2015
