Fourcy learnt to paint by himself. He relied exclusively on a palette knife generously loaded with paint to recreate the seracs, glaciers and couloirs so familiar to him as a peintre-alpiniste. It took considerable skill to avoid over saturating the colour and tone. Fourcy’s experience from a lifetime’s climbing gave him an advantage in calculating the strength of shadows at altitude; his foregrounds tend to juxtapose the receding composition perfectly.