Searching for a Bigger Subject: Tony Foster

Royal Watercolour Society, Bankside Gallery, London 2–20 July 2008; then until September 2009 in various galleries in the United States.

Credit: A. ENGLEN

Why did you decide to paint remote and dangerous landscapes?

I was a pop artist originally. But I got fed up with using second-hand imagery and thought I should work on things I experienced myself. My first trip followed the journeys of US writer and philosopher Henry Thoreau through the wildernesses in Maine. It seems fairly mundane now. My trips have become more and more extreme.

Your recent paintings are large, yet you paint in situ . Does this present unusual challenges?

All the difficulties are magnified by the scale and the location. It's much more laborious to do a big painting than a small one, and difficult physically to haul a 2-metre-wide drawing board around and lash it to the rocks in high winds. At subzero temperatures, the water for my paint freezes so I mix it with gin.

I suffered from altitude sickness in the Himalayas. I didn't realize how ill I was. I got sicker and sicker until I realized I couldn't carry on. I was coughing blood.

Sometimes it is appallingly difficult and miserable. That's spiced by moments of extraordinary joy if things work out.

Natural subjects were traditionally drawn by artists; now photography has taken over. What are your paintings trying to capture?

I'm not striving for accuracy, but honesty. The work looks different if done in situ, rather than from a photograph, which doesn't contain enough information. My paintings evoke a much greater emotional response. The work isn't just about how the landscape looks, it's about what it's like to live in it and to take the journey.

My exhibition pictures are framed with maps, diary notes and souvenirs. Flint arrowheads on the Grand Canyon paintings symbolize that it has been inhabited for thousands of years. The souvenirs under the Tibetan painting are Buddhist objects. One is wrapped up in Chinese newspaper, bound up and sealed to symbolize the suppression of Tibetan Buddhism.

How did you approach your painting of the Grand Canyon?

It's like doing an enormous jigsaw puzzle. If you try to push in bits that are the wrong shape, it will never work. Two of my most stalwart hiking companions are scientists, geologist Bill Brace from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Winslow Briggs, a Stanford University plant biologist. Travelling through the Grand Canyon with a world-class geologist really made me look.

I don't think art has to have a purpose, but if my work has one then it is to bring back to people these magnificent places of untouched nature that are sublimely beautiful and worthy of our attention and protection.