A painting is a myriad of answers captured on canvas

This was confirmed by looking at the angles of his arm, shoulders and club. His main upper arm is running parallel to the top of the clubhouse on that top horizontal third line (red horizontal line) while his forearms take your gaze up to the top of the golf club’s shaft. That then sends the eye down the shaft (yellow line), matched by the line of his shoulders, to echo what would be the direction of his focus and would lead your eye down to the clubhouse. From there a series of leisurely swings back and forth across the greens, fairways and bunkers (blue line) takes the gaze right down to the bottom of the painting to stop at the upturned heel of the golfer which then leads you back up the strong, fairly straight lines of the figure, placed on the left vertical third line (red line), back to where you started. Any good composition should take your eye right round the picture as it tells you the story behind it.

Those decisions made, I drew the answers out on the actual canvas and started painting knowing that I still had a very important decision to make: the colour of the golfer’s clothes. So many golfers wear white caps and/or shirts but I had to be careful that they didn’t blur into the white clubhouse . . . I wanted to link the two elements but not merge them quite that much!

Once the sky and the clubhouse were painted, I knew that I could use a white cap but needed a different colour polo shirt. I liked the idea of blue and with his raised arms and hairline coming between shirt and sky, if I used a stronger shade of blue than I’d used in the sky, it would work. The trousers were probably the hardest colour choice simply because the usual colours were cream, brown, fawn, green . . . all the sorts of colours used in the actual golf course that he was stood in front of. I tried various shades before settling on this one with a more yellow tinge than the dunes and the browns for the shading being placed either inside the main trouser colour or, where they go on the outside, placed against greener elements.

I also knew that at the back of my mind was a question that I didn’t answer for definite until the final day of painting: did I want to pinpoint a particular golfer?

It was never intended to be a portrait but with the masses of light brown curls that I painted flowing out from under his cap on that last day, the vast majority of people who I have spoken with about the painting seem to think that I was showing my support for a certain local golfer . . .

The Southport Contemporary Arts Summer Open art exhibition is on at the ArtHouse Gallery, 65 Eastbank Street, Southport, until August 15 and even when the gallery is closed, you can still see this painting because it is in the window display.

As the world’s best golfers and their fans were in Southport for the Open golf championships at Royal Birkdale, my painting of a golfer focused on Open glory at said Royal Birkdale is part of the window display of the SCA’s Summer Open art exhibition.

The painting was created especially for this exhibition whose theme is “Southport: Land, Sand and Sea” aiming to showcase everything that is special about the town – and in this case, that includes a certain golf course and a certain golfer!

I have often been asked how I go about creating a painting, so I thought I would use this as an example of the creative thinking processes behind a finished canvas.

Sometimes you go to start your next artwork and it could be absolutely anything, any size and any media especially if, like me, you work in a range of painting and drawing media and cover just about any subject you can name. Then the problem isn’t thinking of something to draw or paint but deciding which of the 100s of pictures you’d love to create do you do first.

It is easier when you start by wanting to create an artwork for a particular event or exhibition, as that event’s theme, rules or requirements narrows down your scope. So, Southport Contemporary Arts’ Summer Open art exhibition’s theme is “Southport: Land, Sand and Sea” and they want to celebrate the best things about the resort.

It still left a vast array of things to focus on and as I love drawings and paintings using perspective, I did think about some of the wonderful architecture in my hometown. I have already done some paintings and drawings of the resort’s Victorian buildings and historic pier and I have included this one of Wayfarers Arcade in Southport (pictured below) as my second submission for the exhibition.

However, the theme of the Summer Open was chosen because it coincided with the golf Open being staged in the resort and the organisers wanted to appeal to the many golfers and golf fans who would be in the resort.

I also love figure drawing so I began to imagine a painting with an actual golfer as the main subject. I imagined the twists and turns that I could get if the golfer was pictured just at the end of his swing at the point where they seem to freeze as they watch the ball travelling through the air to see where it is going to land.

That would make it topical, but how to make that fit the brief of being about Southport?

As the golf Open was being played at the Royal Birkdale links for the 11th time, incorporating something about the course would give me the location requirement for the exhibition’s theme.

For many people, one golf course looks pretty much the same as another, so how do I make a golfer playing a shot look like he’s just hit the ball at Royal Birkdale, apart from having the links with loads of sand dunes and marram grass?

No matter how similar golf courses and links may look, the thing that sets Royal Birkdale apart from other courses is its iconic white, 1930s, Art Deco clubhouse facing the 18th green (see section, below, taken from the main painting).

So a golfer at full twist and Royal Birkdale clubhouse in the distance gave me the main elements, but before sorting out the specific details the next two questions to answer were: what medium and what size?

I wanted it to stand out so I needed colour and a large canvas. That ruled out pencil (lack of colour), and pastel and watercolour (unsuited for canvas) and left acrylics or oils. The submission deadline for the exhibition meant that oils had no chance of drying, so I went with a large canvas painted in acrylics.

With the canvas selected, next comes the compositional questions. Luckily these days most of us don’t work in the complex mathematical frameworks like the Golden Ratio, and instead we use the rule of thirds with an S shape or at least triangular shapes running through it in order to guide the viewer’s eye right the way round the image. The one golden rule is never to place the main item right in the middle of the painting.

So I start to place the two main elements: the golfer and the clubhouse. Luckily one is a vertical shape and the other horizontal so it helped enormously. Thus, the golfer was going to go on either the left or the right vertical third line, while the clubhouse is meant to be in the distance so it will go on the top horizontal third line, i.e. the horizon line that is furthest from the viewer.

It was crucial to have the correct position of the golfer at the end of the swing and even if I could have found someone to model it for me, it would have been impossible for them to have held that pose for more than a few minutes. Thank heavens for video.

I got some videos of golfers teeing off and kept taking screenshots until I got the most extreme amount of swing with a golfer with his back to the viewer so that he is looking towards where the clubhouse is going to be (see section, left, taken from the main painting).

Then I needed photos of the clubhouse. Not a problem, it’s only just down the road from me. By the time I was sorting this out, they were already erecting the stands for the spectators at the Open to view the final hole on the course so I wanted to include them to give the impression of it being a shot played as part of this world famous golf tournament.

Next issue was being able to see the clubhouse from the angle that I wanted in positioning these two main elements. That turned out not to be the 18th tee but one of the earlier ones. From there I had row upon row of bunkers, fairways, dunes, paths and masses of grasses between the figure and the clubhouse.

Obviously I wanted to have it looking like there is a good distance between the golfer and his final goal of the 18th hole, and in this case that created its own set of issues to resolve.

In creating distance in a painting we can usually use both shapes and colours but in this painting both were difficult. Shapes are things like using the perspective of buildings or roads getting smaller as they go away from you but there were only a few rambling paths and the only building was the clubhouse which was face on to you with only the tiniest amount of perspective. Even the sand dune bunkers couldn’t suggest disappearing perspective because they could be any size or shape.

So could I use colour to suggest distance instead? Usually you have the stronger, sharper colours in the foreground and the paler, less distinct ones heading off into the distance. In this case, all the links between the golfer and the clubhouse were grasses and sand dunes, sometimes the grasses were the manicured greens and other times the scrubby grasses surrounding the dune bunkers and the sandy pathways. In other words, all the same colours (see section, right, taken from the main painting).

Creating a sense of distance

I knew that I could put the dunes, grasses, etc in softer focus in the distance with the foreground details in much sharper focus – you can see that with distinct blades of grass and shrubbery at the bottom of the painting. It was a start but it wasn’t enough.

There was one other compositional technique I could use: the human figure. We use the human figure to decide scale and size. For instance, to decide on the size of a tree in a painting it is much easier if there’s a human figure nearby. Take, say, a 50cm tree in a painting where the figure is 20cm and it’s not a very big tree; change the figure to 5cm and it’s heading for a Giant Redwood!

Obviously the size of the golfer to the size of the clubhouse leaves us hoping the building is in the distance otherwise he couldn’t fit inside it. That gets confirmed, and the building pushed back, by the inclusion of tiny figures walking across the final green, stood in front of the clubhouse windows and even sat up in the stands (see section, below, taken from the main painting). None of these tiny figures are painted in any detail because they are meant to be too far away but working with a tiny brush you can get the impression of some of the figures walking, even dragging something which the viewer will presume is a golf trolley.

Some of the elements about which I have spoken are things that are resolved during the actual painting process, but there was one more decision to make in the compositional drawing before any paint was applied. That was the exact position of the figure.

I’d decided that he was going on the left vertical third line because of the shape of his body from the video stills would have put him looking out of the picture plane if placed on the right side third line and instead I wanted him looking straight at the clubhouse (see photo below of painting divided using the rule of thirds).

The top of the clubhouse was already placed on the upper horizontal third line, but how high or low would he be on that left vertical line? I thought it made sense to have his upper body and the golf club cutting through the clubhouse as I could use it to link the two elements, but not to cut in so much that it no longer looked like it was definitely Royal Birkdale.

What about his head height? Above the building, level with it, or below it? I tried sketching all possible combinations and decided that if his head was above the top of the clubhouse then the tilt of the head would give a directional gaze looking towards the place he was ultimately heading for.

Lancashire Artist of the Year 2024 Finalist