Wilderness artist Tony Foster reveals his most daring adventures in Cambridge show
When artist Tony Foster sets up his drawing board in some of the world’s wildest places he knows he is taking a risk – like the time he was chased by a bear or needed emergency treatment for altitude sickness.
But these problems have not discouraged the 75-year-old watercolour artist whose paintings from some of the world’s most remote and threatened landscapes go on display in Cambridge this week.
His exhibition, ‘Fragile Planet – Watercolour Journeys into Wild Places’, will be open in Magdalene College’s new Robert Cripps Gallery until April 14.
Tony, who has spent more than 30 years painting rainforests, deserts, coral reefs, mountains and volcanoes, said: “It’s a selection of work really from the last 40 years of my travelling and working in the world’s great wildernesses. They’re not simply landscape paintings, because they are done on site. It’s what it feels like to live there and includes written diaries with each piece and souvenirs and notes and maps and all sorts of things which kind of draw people into the paintings.”
He faced many obstacles and scary situations on his travels in order to soak up the atmosphere of these wild places, including being chased by a bear. Tony said: “I was sitting on a rocky promontory with a more or less vertical drop off both sides, on the edge of it doing a painting looking down into a beautiful valley.
“And I turned and I noticed that an aspen tree behind me was shaking vigorously, and yet there wasn’t any wind and I thought that’s really weird. And it turns out there was a bear who was sort of scratching at it and pushing it around. Then the bear obviously knew where I was and it charged me and because I didn’t have anywhere to go, it sort of trapped me.
“I put my drawing board above my head and ran back at it shouting obscenities and at the top of my voice, and it turned around and climbed up a tree.”
His paintings highlight the precariousness of the world’s most remote and endangered environments in the face of climate change and human intervention.
“Nobody can spend long periods of time in these places without becoming concerned for their future”, he says. “While painting in primary rainforest, I heard chainsaws whining and enormous trees crashing to the ground. I canoed down clear rivers where gold dredgers poison the water with mercury, camped in pristine deserts knowing the prehistoric water tables were being sucked dry.
“In the Arctic, as the ice melts, mining companies are moving into pristine landscapes. Sitting underwater on scuba, I have drawn myriads of fish of unimaginable variety and beauty, to find, a year later, the corals bleached, and the fish gone.”
Unable to travel during the first pandemic lockdown in early 2020, Tony re-focused on “what’s outside my own back door” and every morning took a sketchbook and pencil on his walks around his village making sketches and notes of anything he found – and, back in his studio, created a small painting each day.
The exhibition is free and open to all. Visitors should call at the porters’ lodge at Magdalene College prior to their visit.
