Travelling with Tony Foster comes with a disclaimer. According to the terms of the contract signed by the British painter\u2019s prospective companions: \u201cYou must have sufficient personal insurance for your body to be flown home in case of fatality.\u201d Or, as he warns beforehand: \u201cThere will be times on this journey when you wish you were absolutely anywhere else.\u201d Fortunately, there is an upside to Foster\u2019s deep wilderness expeditions in search of the perfect vantage point for a watercolour. \u201cThere will also be times of great joy, when you experience things you never, ever would\u2019ve dreamt of.\u201d<\/p>\n
Director David Schendel presumably signed in blood before hitching a raft ride with Foster on the Green River in Wyoming and Utah to make this engrossing docu-portrait. The 79-year-old \u2013 described by one longtime acquaintance as \u201ctwo toothpicks in a potato\u201d \u2013 is improbably hardy after more than 30 years of trekking: in the great American outdoors, Bolivia, Mount Everest, you name it. He needs to be: on one foray, it took him 16 days to locate the right spot. Once the easel is down, the self-taught artist makes luminous, airy panoramas with a jewel-like clarity. It doesn\u2019t seem to be merely a question of imbuing a landscape with his personal feelings. The work, apparently, is meditative; it\u2019s about what the landscape puts into him.<\/p>\n
Foster has a streak of self-sufficiency: growing up in deepest Lincolnshire, he bridled against traditional schooling and, for a time, wound up homeless on the streets of swinging London (something he initially refuses to discuss). Even so, the film doesn\u2019t pinpoint why, decades later, he is still so driven. He states that he is a political artist, seeking to capture wildernesses that are fast disappearing. Time in the geological sense also looms; he speaks of being a \u201cmolecule on a gnat\u2019s eyelash\u201d in the face of nature\u2019s monumentality. But it\u2019s not clear if that\u2019s a source of succour or \u2013 still sallying forth in old age \u2013 something to be defied, Werner Herzog-style.<\/p>\n
The film dissipates a touch when the old master gets back to his Cornish studio, where he finishes off each painting; Foster is crestfallen when his Green River haul is shipped off to the gallery. Some of Schendel\u2019s shots on the trail are almost as splendid as his subject\u2019s creations \u2013 but he doesn\u2019t have to put in quite the same work.<\/p>\n