Graham Beal FORMER CEO AND DIRECTOR OF THE DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ARTS, FORMER DIRECTOR OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART, AND CURRENT ADVISOR TO THE FOSTER MUSEUM Graham Beal in Conversation with the Artist Tony Foster GRAHAM BEAL | Tony, I’d like to go back to the beginning for the benefit of people who are encountering your work for the first time. Your early work was very much in the mode of the pop era. And this is far removed from where you are now. I wondered what lay behind the shift. Was it gradual, or was it some sort of epiphany that made you move away from the early mode? TONY FOSTER | I think there were two epiphanies. One was reading David Hockney’s early autobiography. In it, he said that when he was at the Royal College he was a friend of Ron Kitaj. At the time, his painting was going badly. He didn’t know what he was doing and he was feeling pretty depressed. And Kitaj said, no wonder your work is crap because you’re not painting about the things you care about. “Why don’t you paint about the things you care about?” And so Hockney switched his style and started to paint about the things he cared about, which were his relationships. And when he went to California, his style opened up entirely. And that’s when he started to become successful, when he did those early pieces about relationships and those extraordinary California paintings. So I was beginning to run out of steam, and I thought, well, actually, I’m not painting about things I care about either. I’m painting about American football. I knew nothing about American football and cared even less, really. I didn’t know one team from another. And then I was painting boxing matches; I didn’t know much about those either. I did a couple of paintings about Playboy bunnies, but I don’t know any, never met one as far as I know. And so, it occurred to me that I wasn’t painting about things I cared about either. I was always using secondhand imagery and making ironical comments about current society. But it was nothing I was engaged in. So I thought, what do I care about? Well, I care about the environment, I’ve always cared about that. What do I like doing? Well, I like being outdoors, I like hiking, and I like exploring as much as one could in the UK. So I thought, well, perhaps I’ll try and incorporate that into the work instead. So I started making rather minor journeys across Dartmoor and that kind of thing, doing some incredibly mediocre landscape paintings and then adding bits and pieces to them, maps and that sort of thing, to make them a bit more interesting. I discovered that actually, people were much more interested in the events of the journey than they were in the landscape paintings I was doing, not surprisingly, really. I realized that people actually like to get engaged with the subject rather than just look at it or look at a nice view, so I started to incorpo- rate that. That was my first epiphany. And my second was when I was doing my series about Henry Thoreau, and I went to Maine to follow Henry Thoreau’s journeys, which seemed to me like wilderness — enormous lakes and rivers and vast forests — I realized that wilderness was extraordinary, unlike anything I’d ever encountered. It’s not a European concept really. I mean we don’t think of anywhere in Europe as being true wilderness. GB | Were you in Cornwall at this time? TF | Yeah. I was living in Cornwall. When I came to the States and realized that vast areas that seemed like untouched nature really existed, I absorbed myself in it for six weeks while I was in Maine. That total absorption in wild places, scarcely ever encountering other humans, was a revelation. I then went from there to do the John Muir 14
