When the Flyer last checked in with Tom Foster roughly one year ago, the underground artist had just released Midtown Sketchbook, and his artwork was soon to be featured on the album cover of the North Mississippi Allstars’ Electric Blue Watermelon, in a documentary about Cowboy Jack Clement, and in the feature film Forty Shades of Blue.
So what’s Foster up to these days? Earlier this summer, Then and Again on South Main hosted a show of Foster’s nude sketches from his ’79-’81 art-student days, and this Friday, 
August 25th, it will hold an opening reception for “Barbarian Records Survivors Presents: Moon Lake ‘N’ More,” which features work by Foster and his old artists-in-arms Jim Blake and Jim Dickinson. On display will be the “Moon Lake” series of photos, which kept the now-AWOL Blake from failing out of Baylor in the late ’60s, Dickinson’s atmospheric photos of rural, pre-casino Mississippi, and Foster’s own decades-long selection of watercolor portraits of Dickinson.
The opening is also meant as a precursor to future projects. “I’ve finished a comic book that illustrates the lyrics to the Allstar’s Electric Blue Watermelon. It’s part of a collaboration with Luther Dickinson that will also feature his art from his days as a student of mine,” he says. Another project in the works is a documentary on Barbarian Records, working title: Robert E. Howard Meets Memphis Music: The Barbarian Records Story. The much-whispered and tossed-about project fell to Foster when he realized how much material he had about the infamous label. 
“I’ve got so much interview footage, I’m sitting on so much, I can call it The Art Director’s Cut,” says Foster.
Opening Reception for “Barbarian Records Survivors Present:
Moon Lake ‘N’ More” at Then and Again, 506 S. Main, 6-9 p.m. Friday, August 25th
