Painted Course

The View

Your hole, in the hand you choose.

Send a photograph from wherever you stood on the hole. A digital painting of your photograph, made by an image model, comes back in about 30 seconds, in one of eleven hands, and you order the print only if you love it.

Paint your photograph

Painting opens soon. Every course in the studio can be drawn today.

Draw Your Course

The Five Styles

One photograph, five hands. Every one of these is a digital painting of the same photograph, made by an image model.

The Masters

Six hands, four holes. Each one keeps the line from tee to green where you stood, and changes everything else.

Every painting here was made by an image model, from the picture left of the line.

The photograph: a bunker with a rake in it and a flag on the green at Bundoran, the town and a flat-topped mountain behind. The painting: the same bunker, flag and town in short strokes of orange, green and violet under a flaming evening sky.
Left of the line, the photograph. Right of it, the painting.

After Claude Monet

Impressionist

Light broken into short strokes, and the green becomes the brightest thing on the hole. The bunker and the flag stay where the photographer stood at Bundoran.

Painted from a bunker and flag at Bundoran by Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The photograph: the 10th green at Congressional across a pond, two bunkers in front and trees and the clubhouse behind. The painting: the same green turned into overlapping planes of ochre, grey and olive, the flag standing in the middle.
Left of the line, the photograph. Right of it, the painting.

After Picasso and Braque

Cubist

The 10th green at Congressional, folded into planes and seen from several sides at once, as analytic Cubism took a still life apart between 1909 and 1912. The flag keeps its place in every plane.

Painted from the 10th green at Congressional by Carl Lindberg, CC BY 2.5.

The photograph: a long pale bunker curving through the fairway at Ashgrove, gum trees on a hillside behind. The painting: the same bunker and hillside built from small dots of pure colour, the flag at the right edge.
Left of the line, the photograph. Right of it, the painting.

After Georges Seurat

Pointillist

Dots of pure colour that mix in your eye from three paces. Ashgrove's 10th, built the way Seurat built the grass of La Grande Jatte; stand back and the bunker comes together.

Painted from the 10th hole at Ashgrove by Ashgrove DJM, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Our Aerial drawing of the 2nd at the Ocean Course, Kiawah Island: fairways, sand and water from the survey, seen from above. The painting: the same hole in Prussian blue and cream, with rows of breaking waves around the fairways and the line of play still drawn.
Left of the line, our Aerial drawing. Right of it, the painting.

After Katsushika Hokusai

Woodblock

Flat colour and a carved line, and the sea stands up like a wave beside the green. Under the waves at the Ocean Course's 2nd, the line of play still runs tee to green.

Painted over our Aerial drawing of the hole, from its OpenStreetMap survey (ODbL).

The photograph: the 10th green at Congressional across a pond, two bunkers in front and trees and the clubhouse behind. The painting: the same green in pastel lime and pink, the pond streaked rose, the trees in red, orange and blue.
Left of the line, the photograph. Right of it, the painting.

After the Fauves of 1905

Fauve

Colour straight from the tube, the way the Fauves painted Collioure in the summer of 1905. Congressional's 10th keeps its pond, its two bunkers and its flag; only the colour goes wild.

Painted from the 10th green at Congressional by Carl Lindberg, CC BY 2.5.

The photograph: a long pale bunker curving through the fairway at Ashgrove, gum trees on a hillside behind. The painting: the same bunker outlined in pink and violet light, the trees strung with green lights under a purple night sky.
Left of the line, the photograph. Right of it, the painting.

After no one

Neon

Ashgrove's 10th after dark, every edge drawn in glowing tube. The bunker, the flag and the hillside sit exactly where the photographer saw them.

Painted from the 10th hole at Ashgrove by Ashgrove DJM, CC BY-SA 4.0.

What it is, and what it isn't

The View is a digital painting of your photograph, made by an image model and printed the same way as every course drawing. It paints what the camera saw, from wherever you stood on the hole. It doesn't measure anything: the yards, the hole numbers and the survey belong to the drawings in the studio, so a View carries just the two figures you type for Yardage.

Each master is named for what it is after, and nothing is copied from a living painter or from a painting. Neon is after no one. A master keeps the hole where it was, and its brush is free with everything else, so a Cubist green may sit in three planes at once.

Every photograph is checked before it is painted. One with a person as its subject, or with no course in it, is refused and not counted. People, carts, signs and logos are left out of every painting, and so is all writing: the model never draws a letter, so the numbers on a Yardage are set by us.

How many can I paint?

Three a day, free, with nothing to sign up for. The proof carries a mark across it; the print you order doesn't. Paint the same hole in two hands, and order the one you'd hang by your door.