Mont Blanc from Bel Aire

Tony Foster (2012)

Analysis Paper: Arts 001A - Winter 2022
Joe Martinka

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 Landscapes are eternal. Not only in reality, but also in the mind of artists, collectors and

people who enjoy them. They are unlikely to ever go out of style. I choose to talk about one

from Tony Foster, a living British artist watercolorist, specializing in wilderness landscapes. His

work entitled “Mont Blanc from Bel Aire” is a watercolor and graphite on paper including dried

flowers and an acrylic map. It measures 36 x 52 inches (.92 to 1.32 meters).

This piece is part of a permanent collection of hundreds of Foster’s works in in The

Foster Museum (http://thefoster.org). This local museum is open and free to the public at 940

Commercial Street in Palo Alto California. Since Covid, the museum has been open by

appointment only to limit the number of current patrons at one time. I have viewed this

painting for purposes of this paper during a late morning appointment on Feb 2, 2022.

This is a work of art that holds a very personal connection to me. Not only is Tony

Foster my inspiration for starting in the discipline and joy of watercolor painting, but so is his

dedication to valuing and promoting the dwindling wild spaces on our planet. The subject of

this painting is in the French Alps which is my objective during a 2022 bicycle trip in June. As

well, Foster has developed techniques over six decades of artistic work, and his mastery of the

different effects he achieves that I will describe in this painting is instructive to me. In a sense,

he is one of the “Masters” of the art that I need to study in depth to inform my development as

an artist, in the way that Joshua Reynolds in 1769’s “A DISCOURSE: Delivered to the Students of

the Royal Academy…” describes the process of the study of painting.

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 Mont Blanc from Bel Aire was substantially completed by Foster between June 19 and

June 23, 2012. He later added some detail later in his Cornwall England studio. During the

painting, Foster was accompanied by a film crew who were making a documentary on

mountain artists, and this painting’s creation was then documented on film. A portion of the

documentary related to this piece (about 3 minutes) is included in the resource notes at the

end of this paper.

This work shows the stress of being clipped and held in place in multiple sittings during

the four-day period in 2012. The edges are rough and torn as seen in the mounting. There are

some penciled notes viewable in and at the side of the painting that helped him complete it in

the studio. Tony Foster is known to backpack his materials to most of his wild landscapes. He

typically renders most of the work ‘on-site’ before taking notes and doing some details back in

his Cornwell England studio. (His largest-ever al fresco work was seven feet wide and took 23

days on site to complete. Fittingly, it was of the Grand Canyon, and also on display in this

museum merely 10 meters away from this piece.)

As is typical for Foster works of recent decades, he considers a painting as part of his

actual artistic journey. His motivations over decades have been to document and promote the

preservation of the beauty and remoteness of extraordinary wild places. He names his quest

“Exploring Beauty: Watercolour Diaries from the Wild”. Dozens of luminaries have nominated

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worldwide subjects for Foster’s art. For this piece, a celebrated 40-year Alps mountain guide

and artist, Lionel Wibault, motivated Foster’s pick of subject and viewing location.

Foster’s motivations are similar to those by Jiang Shijie in the “The Three Perfections”.

Jiang’s landscapes are painted for their spiritual content more than their pecuniary potential.

The goal is to capture the beauty and serenity of a place. Foster wants to inspire conservation.

Like Jiang who wrote notes and verse directly on his paintings, Foster annotates his

painting with notes and reflections. In this piece for example, the lower left corner has notes

he made about the design. Often, Foster includes the diary notes, talismans, waters, soil

samples and other souvenirs of the wild place he observes or collects during the painting

process to illustrate the diversity and wildness of a place. These artifacts are mounted directly

underneath the painting. In Mont Blanc from Bel Aire, there are two extra tableaus added

underneath. A small map fragment annotated with the location marked by the artist of his

view. He includes a dried sample of a mountain wildflower. Indeed, the flowers were so

luxurious, the artist made detailed close-up study of the variety and exquisite detail of the

flowers found at his feet while painting and that 3.5-inch x 52-inch bottom painting. Some of

these flowers are also in the foreground of the main painting.

Landscapes have been the domain of painters for thousand years, but only in the last

century or two have artists been able to capture a landscape with other than a brush or cutting

tool. Almost every artist has ventured into rendering landscapes at least in their training, or

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later as a specialty in their career. For example, Rembrandt van Rijn while acclaimed by his

effective use of reflected light on portraits, also did landscapes which also call for contrasting

values from dark to light. Rembrandt’s etching of The Three Trees (1643) creates contrasts by

cross-hatching with parallel lines scratched into the metal plate. In the medium of watercolors,

there are several techniques to create full spans of value. Foster’s work feels light and airy,

even though there is a combination of similar tones in the detail. Despite that color, Foster

wants the work not to feel heavy with pigment but with a liveness and lightness. He does this

by painstakingly leaving little shafts of untouched paper by daubing different colors as if he was

etching the paper. Like Rembrandt, he uses the white paper color in the negative space of his

solid objects to induce a lighter tone. Both artists are judicious where and how close the

etched lines or painted detail is needed for the effect. A closeup of this technique is pictured in

the resources for some of the hill slopes and flowers.

This work by Foster is a contemporary landscape piece, painted merely a decade ago. A

contemporary of Foster’s work is landscape images by Vishay Garbasz. Her photograph

Christianstadt was published in 2005, only eight years before Foster’s Mont Blanc from Bel

Aire. Both artists strive to capture the stark beauties of place; Foster with landscape’s joyful

wildness and Garbasz with the landscape’s darker meanings. Neither chose the same medium

of expression even they were very intent on a realistic rendition of what they saw. Garbasz

used modern photography, where Foster employs traditional watercolors. Common in these

two pieces are the prevalence of the same color pallet of greens, olives browns and mauve

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stones. Trees in the foreground tend to frame the more distant subject of the piece. Both

artists were on a mission to educate others some deeply held emotions and convictions in their

lives but by different paths. Garbasz used it as an illustration for a larger very personal book,

and Foster used his painting to chronicle a singularly beautiful place as part of his world-wide

journey series.

An artist strives to direct the viewers’ attention to the essential focus of the painting.

Malcom Andrews in is book “Landscape and Western Art” speaks to the use of frames as

something viewed from a frame or window. “Immaterial light and air… metonymically

represented in landscape pictures by the material forms the touch, illuminate and vivify”.

Andrews writes that the adroit use of framing “lends a more romantic, more glamorous” scene.

A framing technique might paint an actual window into the work to illustrate the point.

However, Foster in his own words about his composition said that he chose to frame Mt Blanc

by a set of diagonal lines created naturally by the nearer and mid-distance mountains that lead

the eye upward to the eponymous peak. It was fortunate that even the waterfall points the

way. In this way, the artist is using line element to augment the design of his piece using the

lines to cradle or frame his composition.

Foster also needs to illustrate the massive distances involved in the view. There are

both finger-sized wildflowers and the tallest and most massive mountain in Europe in the same

painting. He uses four strategies for depth illusiion as did Joachim Patinir managed in

Landscape with Saint Jerome (1524).

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 As the first strategy, Foster and Patinir used ever decreasing sizes of objects as distance

receded. In Foster’s painting, the closest tree is painted nearly a foot tall. Trees furthest

discernable are a dab of paint about 5 millimeters high with all the heights in between.

Detailed examples follow in the Resource section.

A second strategy employed by both artists is to overlap nearer objects or hills over

those of more distant objects to illustrate placement. Patinir depicts the rock of Jerome’s

refuge hiding the hill of the monastery, which in turn overlaps the more distant countryside,

and the rocky spires there further overlap the hills girding the distant river. The practice of

“Additive Architecture” where the form is developed on the basis of patterns in both culture

and nature is used architecture as well. In Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, the segmented

roofs form a set of curved diagonal lines that suggests a group of natural shapes. Each is set

back from another, overlapping one another to show depth and a seemingly natural set of hills

albeit fractured like bits of half-dome.

Thirdly, the use of lighter and bluer colors of the most distant object recalls the haze

and light changes as the higher frequencies of color (the red end of the spectrum) are reflected

elsewhere over distance. Finally, the painting of distant objects in each of the paintings are

softly rendered, and less distinct than those closer to the viewer’s eye. The town on Patinir’s

river are mere suggestions, as are the talas and rocks found on Foster’s distant mountain

parapet. In fact, those rocks are rendered as scattered flecks of paint.

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 Mont Blanc from Bel Aire serves to illustrate the unique mastery of one type of medium

in the goal of rendering a landscape since there is mastery on display. It also informs me some

of the strategies of color, contrast, composition and care that any artist must master to

illustrate a compelling landscape with the vitality necessary to hold the eyes of the viewer.

This piece by Tony Foster helps me better understand the passion an artist must have to want

to faithfully reproduce a natural landscape because it entails so much work, precision,

preparation and design to make it “work” to be so inspirational.

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REFERENCES
1) Foster and his video made of this painting effort from film “Artistes D’En Haut” by

Montagne TV/Eliocom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO29UaAWh8U

2) Detailed photos illustrating points in the text.

Painting in dots leaving white paper as negative space for lighter tones and an airy
feeling.

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Detail of the strokes leaving white spaces to bright the wildflower study.

The use of dark splatter on distant mountain slopes to suggest loose talas or rocks.

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 Mt Blanc emerges from the cloud mists layered behind the closer peak, a watercolor
precision made more difficult by the fact that the whites are unpainted paper.

Trees in the distance achieved by scaling them to only millimeters in height, but with
tiny brush strokes to suggest light and form.

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 3) Critical evaluation of depth by John Muri Laws

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYN4rKprL4Y&ab_channel=TheFoster

4) The Google Earth 3D view of the painter’s location for this work.

https://earth.google.com/web/search/Les+Houches,+France/

@45.85845729,6.79126935,1888.99757582a,5118.78246049d,35y,126.19306171h,87.2887684

2t,0r/data=CigiJgokCR6ORfkwKUdAEVxJt8FS1kZAGVC8ddyyjhxAIYPJDWwRtRhA

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