Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Englishman captures Idaho’s secret wilderness

Watercolorist Tony Foster debuts new Idaho paintings


By SABINA DANA PLASSE
Express Staff Writer

“Fourteen Days at a Secret Location From the Northside of Frog Pond Looking North” by Tony Foster. Watercolor on paper at Gail Severn Gallery.

Tony Foster makes his home in Cornwall, England, but has spent a great deal of his career coming to Idaho. The watercolorist is not a typical wilderness and landscape painter. When Foster decides to paint the great forest, lands, canyons and mountains of the world, he does not take photographs, make a few sketches and leave—he stays overnight in remote areas for days on end.

"I came to Ketchum at the end of last September to scout out sites, and I came back at the end of June to do the work," Foster said. "I have been to Idaho many times to work in the last 15 years and all of my friends in Idaho are mountain people. A few of them know the mountains really well and know secret places."

Foster decided to paint the precious sites of his Idaho friends but not publicly divulge the locations. He painted nine pieces on locations as far away as two hours from Ketchum.

"One of the places I painted is exquisite," Foster said. "It's off trail with granite domes, ponds, lakes, and it's extraordinary."

Foster said that what's nice about doing projects for the Gail Severn Gallery is that they don't take years off his life. His current show at the Phoenix Art Museum, "Tony Foster: Searching for a Bigger Subject," took him four years to complete. It's a comparison between Mount Everest and the Grand Canyon.

"It's a wonderful thing to come to Idaho for three months and produce a show," Foster said. "I usually include maps and things besides the paintings and what it's like to live there, as well as the weather. With these paintings, I wrote specific instructions and sealed them so you have to buy the painting to know where it is."

Foster will give a talk this evening at the Gail Severn Gallery at 5 p.m. and again on Saturday, Sept. 3, at 10 a.m.

"People will be wondering," Foster said. "Some people have seen the paintings, and have the locations completely wrong."

Sabina Dana Plasse: splasse@mtexpress.com




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