The country's most unfashionable artist

White, male, elderly, works in watercolours. No chance.

This week, the ING Discerning Eye exhibition, a huge open show, is up in the Mall Galleries, central London. I was one of the six judges for the show, helping to select about 700 works out of 6,500 submissions. My findings? There is an enormous amount of talent out there in the UK. There is no particular fashion, trend or genre. It’s all there. Portraits, landscapes, ceramics, abstract, oil, pencil. Whatever might be hot favourite in the Turner Prize this year, or in the Shoreditch galleries, is no guide as to what many people actually want to make, or indeed buy. Have a look here, the show is closed now but still online until Christmas, with lovely pieces ranging from around £100-£3,000.

Tony Foster “Cornish Oak”

And so it is with Tony Foster, the only living British artist to have an eponymous gallery dedicated to his work (it’s in California), who cheerfully admitted to me this week that he would be unlikely to be nominated for the Turner this - or indeed any year - because he is “extremely unfashionable”. His show Exploring Time is on just around the corner from the Mall Galleries, at the Royal Watercolour Society.

“I’d be thrilled to bits to be nominated for the Turner, and I think it would be a breakthrough,” he tells me from his home in Cornwall. “But my work is completely unfashionable. Its figurative, watercolour and done by an old white male. I couldn’t be less fashionable if I tried. However, it is trying to say something.”

Indeed. His work is extremely popular; indeed, it sells out immediately. “I have been ploughing this furrow for 40 odd years,” says Foster, 79, “and I have always had staunch collectors and supporters. Generally speaking however the people who write about it aren’t art critics. I have pretty much been ignored by the critics. I suspect that’s because the public only have attention for about 20 names in the art world. Everyone else is carrying on quietly, on their own without any recognition in the media.”

At least Foster’s work doesn’t need a pamphlet of explanation beside it. “That’s why people like my work, if you buy one of my paintings, people have something to say about it. Rather than, say, a new Terry Frost when they don’t have anything to say about it. Other than ‘Here’s my new Terry Frost’. My pictures have a story.”

The story is as much about how he created the work as the work itself. Foster calls himself an “artist explorer,” painting sea, clouds and wild space with the same painstaking clarity and minute brushstrokes. In his own words, his practise is “Capturing the world’s wilderness and the physical experience of being in a wild place.” He has divided the RWS show into geological time, biological time, human time and “fleeting moments”. All the work has been commissioned by and will eventually hang in the Foster Museum, Palo Alto, California. This is funded by one of his main supporters and patrons, Jane Woodward, and opened in 2013.

Foster has been adventuring into the world’s wilderness for decades now. “The original idea was when I started to follow in the footsteps of Henry Thoreau for an exhibition at the Yale Centre for British art. I went hiking, and painting, through the mountains in Maine. I had never encountered wilderness like it before. All of Europe has been fought over, bought and sold for thousands of years. But this felt like real wilderness. I would walk for 10 days without seeing any other person.” This is what Foster decided to spend his life capturing. “The exhibitions got more and more ambitious as I learned I was capable of living in these places and managing.”

At home in his Cornish studio

Admittedly, he’s not what you might call a city ‘type’. Never has been. “I loved camping when I was young, I was born and bred in the Lincolnshire fens and as a 7-year old kid, if my mum gave me an egg and bacon I would rather cook it outside on a fire, than eat it inside.”

He always works in watercolour. “It’s the most portable medium. My gear is less than the size of a packet of cigarettes. The paint is in a Tupperware box and I mix on the lid. My paper is rolled up in an aluminium tube and my easel folds into two. I carry it on my back. Everything is organised for practicality. I do collect samples, and objects, but they are really as reminders, like a scrap of bird’s nest, than pieces in themselves. Unlike an artist such as, say, Richard Long who brings back rocks with him.”

At work in the Grand Canyon

He admires contemporaries such as Long, who also immerses himself in nature to achieve his sculptures. “Well, Long is a bit more conceptual. People don’t respond to it so readily as they do to watercolours. I do like Andy Goldsworthy, his photographs of chains of leaves going down a river are wonderful.”

He acknowledges those two artists are far more fashionable, but he’s happy with his medium. “The watercolour doesn’t attract critical attention but its much more accessible to the public,” he says. “People get it immediately and understand immediately what its about.” Is that more important? Foster thinks so.

From Painting At The Edge

A documentary film of Foster, Painting At The Edge is on general release. It shows him in his preferred place of work, namely way, way off the beaten track; canoeing down the Green River in Utah, shooting rapids, walking miles through stony terrain until he finds a favoured view to paint. There he will set up his tent. He estimates he has spent about eight years sleeping in a tent, all told. He paints for a couple of hours until it gets dark. Then he is up at dawn, painting until it’s time to move on. Every two hours he takes a tea break. That’s it.

Foster has painted in ice fjords, underwater (drawing and then painting what he has drawn), on three separate flanks of Everest, and in the Grand Canyon. Has he noticed the effects of climate change? “I have noticed climate change and the physical destruction of things I have painted only a few years before. I paint complex and wonderful places, and I hear the chainsaws coming up behind me. I have done drawings underwater in coral reefs and painted the dazzling beauty of those places. The next year, I have returned to find it bleached and gone.”

Maybe he ought to be nominated for the Turner Prize. Because for all his conservative medium, and straightforward messaging, Tony Foster is as radical and politicised as previous winners of the Turner Prize, including Gilbert and George, Lubiana Himid or Grayson Perry. But not as fashionable.