Bio | Statement

I come from a long line of golfers. My father is a golfer, as are my uncles, and my grandma too. And many before them.

A lot of my earliest memories involve golf. My grandfather had converted his garage into a workshop, and every night after dinner I would sit intently and watch him repair wooden clubs. Watching him melt the lead and pour it into the center with great delicacy, sanding the clubhead smooth, repainting the lacquered finish. He was a wizard.

I’ve worked in the golf industry since I was 14, folding clothes at the factory at Ashworth. After college I became the art director for FIDRA, the golf division of Quiksilver, and after that I was a creative consultant at Ashworth again.

But it took a handful of people, and time spent in Scotland to show me that there is much more to this game.

I learned that the game has many origins all over the world. I learned that it was played at first on dunes mowed by rabbits and kept green by rain. I learned it was a family game, once centered around community. I learned the essence of golf is a universal principle—that we are seeking to find the center. And I would come to understand that golf has a soul.

I started LINKSOUL with my uncle, John Ashworth. Our mission: to reconnect people to the soul of the game.

Golf is a practice, like yoga, surfing, and painting. It is something we do to find the limits of our Selves, in order to understand them and eventually (hopefully) expand beyond.

Learning how to draw a line on a page, or on a wave, or on a putting green is all the same thing. Learning how to swing softly, for example, is the same as learning how to paint softly, and both require that we become a softer person. This is how we gain understanding from our practice.

I will be the first to admit that painting a golfer is odd, in the sense that painting a person in their practice is odd. I probably wouldn’t paint an artist in the act of painting. But I have reason with golf…

Like other practices I have mentioned, golf has often been hijacked by those that stand to profit from it. It has been plagued by racism, sexism and classism throughout history.  While strides have been made, much of this still exists in new, more subtle forms of segregation.

Now, according to the Golf Industry, a golfer needs to have a longer ball, a giant metal driver, a shirt that wicks moisture from your body, a bag with a cooling compartment, and a range finder with GPS, all the while “competing” on the longest, greenest, hardest and most expensive course you can find in the desert, and riding in a cart so that you can finish in a quick and orderly fashion.

None of this matters. Golf, like all other practices, has only ever progressed through the souls of people like my grandfather… people who love it.

I paint the people and places that reflect the essential principles of golf in order to reconnect people to the soul of the game.

Why is it relevant? I figure the majority of the world’s ills are caused by the actions of rich men. And the majority of those men play golf. If I can change the way they see the game, maybe that can change the way they see the world.

~Geoff Cunningham