The artist-adventurer who paints in extreme conditions

Tony Foster always knew that he was destined for a life outdoors, but when he found himself as a teenager on the bustling streets of London in the 1960s, he realised he also had a talent for painting. For seven years he taught art at schools around the world, and then, in his mid-thirties, the urge to get out there and simply paint got the better of him. His plan was to combine his love of nature and watercolours to become an artist-explorer. What started as a hike with paintbrushes across an English moorland has taken him to painting all three sides of Everest, to the rainforests of Costa Rica where he faced a charge by hungry white-lipped peccaries, through canyons and deserts and even to draw underwater in the Cayman Islands with an over-affectionate grouper. His ambition is to capture the beauty of some of the world's most bewitching and remote locations, many of which are facing environmental threats, before they disappear. A documentary has just been released about Tony's life called Painting at the Edge.

Eduardo Puppo is an Argentine tennis journalist who spent twelve years researching the results of 22,000 tennis matches to try to prove that tennis great and fellow Argentine Guillermo Vilas had been denied a number one ranking by the ATP in the 1970s. He didn't tell Vilas about the work he was doing for seven of those years, the two are now the closest of friends. This interview was first broadcast in 2021.

Presenter: Jo Fidgen
Producers: Marcia Veiga and Andrea Kennedy

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(Photo: Artist Tony Foster stands in front of an epic view of the Grand Canyon. In front of him is his painting of the scene, he is midway through, his camping stool, tiny paint palette and brushes. Credit: Chris Chapman. Courtesy of The Foster Museum)