Early in my career I struggled with how best to reflect landscape and geography in my own chosen medium, and explored several dead ends in the process: I tried incorpo- rating maps and charts into the compositions, designing melodies based on natural soundscapes, and even using field recordings of a place in a piece about it, only to find again and again that the more literally I tried to represent a place, the less emotional resonance the resulting music would have. Ultimately, I determined that the best way to write music about place was to examine the specifics of my own subjective experience of a landscape and build the music around that, finding, as Tony Foster seems to have found as well, that focusing on a particular and personal moment — a small part of a much larger, ungraspable whole — was a much more effective way to share the experience of place with an audience. All places are fleeting and momentary: a cloud passes, a river floods or runs dry, a rockfall reshapes the face of a mountain. Plants and trees grow, wilt, burn, and grow again. People and wildlife come and go. Any vista, however timeless it might feel to us, will look different from hour to hour, day to day, year to year, and epoch to epoch, and yet in some way will still always be part of the same place. Remembering our personal lens, and understanding how we look at landscapes, matters: an aerial drone can photo- graph geography, but only a human being can perceive and represent a place. When viewing any painting of Tony Foster’s, it is impossible to forget that in this spot, at one moment, a specific person with a unique inner life and set of experiences took in this particular scene, and this is how he saw it. site is foregrounded and unignorable: his paintings are ornamented with secondary images, diary fragments, notes, maps, clarifying text, and even physical items that he collected along the trail, all of which provide rich and clear context for the moment when and where each painting was created. It’s true of all landscape artists but especially true of Foster that when you look at one of his works, you’re not only seeing what he saw, but how he saw it. “Even though we gather together and look in the same direction at the same instant, we will not — we cannot — see the same landscape,” the geographer D.W. Meinig wrote in his 1979 essay “The Beholding Eye.” “We may certainly agree that we will see many of the same elements — houses, roads, trees, hills — in terms of such denotations as number, form, dimension, and color, but such facts take on meaning only through association; they must be fitted together according to some coherent body of ideas. Thus we confront the central problem: any landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads.” What strikes me as so effective, even magical, about Foster’s practice is how clearly it simultaneously represents both the scenes before his eyes and those within his head. Even by organizing his bodies of work by the Journeys on which he made them, he urges the viewer to consider these images as documents of moments in time, small windows into a longer, deeper, richer experience. The places that he depicts in his work, like the images themselves, are at once timeless and attached to a very specific instant. The practice that he has landed on over decades of diligent work makes clear in every image that the best way to lend a viewer even a sense of the vast whole of the landscapes considered in each painting is to vividly render an impres- sion of a small and deeply personal experience of place within each one. FLEETING MOMENTS The World in a Moment Ben Cosgrove MUSICIAN, WRITER, COMPOSER AND SONIC “PLEIN AIR” ARTIST I first encountered Tony Foster’s work in an unusually serendipitous way: in 2024 I was invited across the country to perform at the wedding of two friends who were to be married inside The Foster Museum in Palo Alto. I had previously known nothing of Tony Foster or his art, but I was immediately struck not only by the grace and power of the paintings themselves but by the rich interrelatedness, narrative, and personal depth of the pieces within each group of works: walking through the museum was like reading an autobiography of Foster himself, with his enthusiasms, interests, and memories bursting from the edges of every landscape. Tony Foster’s work resonates especially strongly with me in part because of my own oddly specific career: I’m a traveling pianist who composes instrumental music inspired by landscape, place, topography, and environment, and as such, I have wrestled for years with the inherent challenges of representing landscape and geography in a way that feels compelling and engaging but also relatable and honest. The experience of any place is such a complex and irreducible phenomenon that any artist translating it into another medium — be that watercolors, piano music, or something else entirely — necessarily requires a series of important decisions about what to include, what to focus on, and what not to. Foster, for instance, includes no wildlife and minimal evidence of human presence in the landscapes he renders, but his own personal engagement with each 104
