324 pages, hardback, 345 x 305 mm, 240 colour illustrations
PRICE: £39.95
ISBN: 978 0 295988 17 7
Customers in the US or Canada, CLICK HERE
In the Grand Canyon and on the icy flanks of Mount Everest, deep in rainforests and deserts, under water and at the mouths of live volcanoes – Tony Foster paints his expansive watercolours at the edges of the world. Presented here with personal accounts of his journeys, they are an exultant testament to the power of art and the richness and fragility of our planet. His meticulously executed watercolours demonstrate his complete mastery of the centuries-old tradition of English landscape painting.
For Foster each work is a page in a visual diary, a richly pictorial chronicle of events and encounters along the way which constitutes both journey and destination. In his composite images, maps and diagrams, together with details of flora and fauna, contextualize the principal subjects. The packets of seeds, like the pouches of volcanic dust, combine similarly the narrative of particular journeys with different time scales and forces of nature. Tony Foster has succeeded in seeing, and conveying by means of the most subtle of visual metaphors, “eternity in a grain of sand”.
Tony Foster has exhibited in many major museums and galleries, including the Smithsonian Institution, Yale Centre for British Art, the Royal Watercolour Society and the Royal Geographical Society.
This book is first published to accompany the major exhibition at Compton Verney, ‘The Artist’s Studio’, staged at this great Adam-designed country house in Warwickshire. This rarely studied subject is covered in expert essays based upon new research from the late sixteenth century to the present day, focusing upon artists from Rembrandt and Courbet, via Rossetti and Cézanne to Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. More