"I was born in North Wales at the end of 1943. My father, who was an excellent draughtsman, taught me drawing and painting from a very early age. Later I went to art school in London, however, soon after leaving I became interested in film making and worked as a film director for almost thirty years. I have always been fascinated by the moving image, especially the human figure in motion and throughout my time in films I also continued to work as an artist.
Now I am committed entirely to my painting and trying to create the illusion of movement in a static image.
Although I started by using the sequence photographs of Eadweard Muybridge as source material I now use still frames from videos I have taken myself of naked models and professional dancers performing in my studio. From these I do a great many drawings and I will overlay two, more often three, positions before selecting only those lines and shapes that I feel best describe the movement. I do not re-invent my figures, everything is already there. I simply work through a reduction process until I arrive at the final composition.
I do not want to blur the figures to suggest their movement but believe that by using the ambiguity of their positions in a clear and precise way I can deceive the eye. It's rather like those old positive/negative puzzles where you cannot see one without immediately seeing the other, so they must appear to move."
As American art historian Dr. Jeff Taylor described it in his speech at the opening of a show at the
Ari Kupsus Gallery, "The paintings move. They jump. With each blink of the eye, and each re-focus, they leap again off the canvas.
Milburn Foster's work can be found in many private collections,
the majority in London, Sydney, Paris, Milan, Zurich, Brussels and Budapest.
