Travelling with Tony Foster comes with a disclaimer. According to the terms of the contract signed by the British painter’s prospective companions: “You must have sufficient personal insurance for your body to be flown home in case of fatality.” Or, as he warns beforehand: “There will be times on this journey when you wish you were absolutely anywhere else.” Fortunately, there is an upside to Foster’s deep wilderness expeditions in search of the perfect vantage point for a watercolour. “There will also be times of great joy, when you experience things you never, ever would’ve dreamt of.”
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 – described by one longtime acquaintance as “two toothpicks in a potato” – 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’t seem to be merely a question of imbuing a landscape with his personal feelings. The work, apparently, is meditative; it’s about what the landscape puts into him.
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’t 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 “molecule on a gnat’s eyelash” in the face of nature’s monumentality. But it’s not clear if that’s a source of succour or – still sallying forth in old age – something to be defied, Werner Herzog-style.
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’s shots on the trail are almost as splendid as his subject’s creations – but he doesn’t have to put in quite the same work.
Tony Foster: Painting at the Edge is in UK cinemas from 14 November.