Late to the Paint

There’s a new painter in town. His resume, however, is multifaceted: museum directing, ceramic sculptor, photographer. It’s just that until this year he never picked up a paint brush.

"It’s possible that constantly being in the company of Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, I was intimidated," said Jim Foster, 93, flashing his boyish grin.

Looking at his large tempera paintings on paper and acrylics on canvas gives the viewer a window into the creative soul who has dedicated his life to art. Foster’s first solo painting exhibition, "A New Beginning: Daring to Seek the Unknown," opens with a celebration of his 94th birthday. He says the location, the Louis Pohl Gallery, is particularly appropriate since Pohl’s work always inspired him.

"He was a master of his time in Hawaii. He recorded the essence of a thing," Foster said.

It isn’t his first show with gallery owner Sandy Pohl. Earlier, well-received exhibits featured his large-scale ceramic sculptures and Chinatown photographs. He mentions being influenced by Murray Turnbull and Duane Preble, artist-educators from his years serving as director at the Honolulu Academy of Arts (recently renamed the Honolulu Museum of Art). Still, he didn’t paint.

Foster grew up in Baltimore in a creative family but says that a children’s Saturday museum class for drawing from plaster casts of classic Greek sculpture was "about it for art training." He cited piano, literature and history as home and school arts education.

He left his studies as an English major at Johns Hopkins University, enlisting in the Navy in 1941, but not before he was introduced to American painter Harold Wrenn. Deployed to Hawaii, Foster visited Kauai, took a photo and, remembering Wrenn’s work, painted the Wailua River.

He entered the painting in a nonjuried show at the academy. His work hung on a wall, and his name went into the archives of the museum.

Out of the Navy and having graduated from American University, Foster followed a career path that led him to being director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, then the Honolulu academy from 1963 to 1982, where he took on the challenge of expanding its collections.

To bring a Monet to the museum, he executed a trade with a New York collector. The museum’s Picasso painting was another trade, made with a dealer in Switzerland.

His history at the academy also included opening the gift shop and creating a volunteer committee to widen the museum experience. One of the group’s projects included the now-famous cafe, which was originally run by volunteers.

Foster says besides taking the leap to painting, one of his wilder ideas was exhibiting an artist at the academy who was hanging telephone poles at the front door.

"I called my friend, architect Val Ossipoff, to check out the safety of the installation," he recalled. At the same time, he suggested digging a tunnel under Beretania Street that would connect the museum to Thomas Square, which he wanted to transform into a sculpture park.

Ossipoff told him no. It would be better to take on other challenges, the architect advised.

"Living all those years with masterpieces, I was convinced that I would never satisfy myself as a painter," said Foster.

But upon approaching his 94th birthday, he pondered his friend’s advice and took on this challenge.