Tidal Visions showcases a new body of work by early career artist Carl Foster. Foster’s mission in his painting practice is to achieve balance in line, tone and colour – providing harmony and flow to his overall composition.

A large part of Foster’s inspiration and subject matter is drawn from Auckland’s brooding West Coast which is itself lively with rhythm, tone and form. Foster is one of a handful of contemporary painters who produce work ‘plein air’ (outdoors) preferring to work directly from the source, imaginatively reworking his surroundings with an acute sense of movement and drama.

Foster rarely uses preparatory sketches, preferring to work directly onto the surface without much premeditation, instinctively building up each painting by allowing each line to inform the next. Symbols and intersecting planes can offer a way into deciphering his work but the beauty lies in discovering new forms and developing relationships. Dramatic landforms and lyrical shapes undulate, glide and bow, providing a rhythmic flow for the viewer to move through.

Carl Foster is a New Zealand born painter with Latin heritage whose work is expressed dynamically, in an expressive post cubist tradition. Foster’s output is diverse, encapsulating landscape, still life and abstraction. Recurrent themes in Foster’s work are largely around ecology, the Maori relationship with land and the spirituality which is inherent is this relationship.