24 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {punchline} If you ask Alisa EaglestonCieslewicz to name her favorite painting at The Foster Museum in Palo Alto, there’s no hesitation. It’s Fall Colour, part of British artist Tony Foster’s series of watercolor works called Exploring Beauty. “I love how it captures the beautiful colors of fall. I think that autumn trees are exceptionally beautiful,” she says. When the California native was earning a master’s degree in art history at New York University, she was stunned by the sheer magnitude of the East Coast’s fall display. “One of my favorite things people” who love autumn. “I also really love the individual leaves at the bottom of the work, because I think the larger landscape at the top … captures the overall feel of the season and of the color. But those individual leaves show you the building blocks for that overall impression.” Alisa, the new executive director of The Foster, has been drawn to art since she was a precocious preschooler fascinated by the expressive works of the Rodin PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF: TREVOR BURROWS - THE FOSTER MUSEUM ABOVE: Fall Colour in Great Meadow, Concord, 2012, by Tony Foster is part of Exploring Beauty: Watercolour Diaries from the Wild, and is on display at The Foster Musem in Palo Alto. about living in New York was how Central Park became this amazing wash of different reds and oranges and yellows.” The vibrant landscape, like many of Tony’s plein air watercolor paintings, includes a bit of bonus material at the bottom— in this case a color-coded row of detailed paintings of different leaves. “I think Tony captures that variety of color and the intensity of it so well,” says Alisa, who admits to being “one of those
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