EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Ballasteros and Art’s Bubble

Artists when they conceive their images, even before they begin to paint, are in their studio. The word studio comes from the little room in which Renaissance princes went to study and think. At a time when most people’s lives were played out in public and few had a room of their own, the studio was a privileged place in which its owner could shut himself away. That is why the word was later transferred from the scholar’s study to an artist’s workplace, a thinking-place. In one Renaissance engraving of a studio, the artist himself is in a small room of his own in the foreground and it is only through the doorway in a larger room that his assistants are busily at work painting pictures. I mention this because the champion golfer, Steve Ballasteros, died yesterday at the age of 54.

Ballasteros was a brilliant performer, could hit every shot in the bag, as Ben Crenshaw put it, and do it with style. He won his first major, the British Open, by deliberately hitting a drive into the parking-lot to take advantage of the prevailing winds; from there he chipped a sand-wedge to the green and sank a 20-foot putt beating Jack Niklaus by 3 shots. That took not just craft, the seemingly effortless control of a golfer’s limbs and body, but thought too, deep thought. This is how Steve described performing on tour in his 1991 book Natural Golf: “I never hear my playing partner’s clubs rattling, and I rarely ever hear the gallery applauding. I’m grinding as hard as I can inside my own bubble.” He lived in his mind consciously unaware of what was happening. His body, though, would perform at peak pitch, reacting to conditions in the outside world subconsciously, the reverse of how it works in the lives of lesser folk. Artists, though, are performers too. While conceiving a picture in their studio they think inwardly like Ballasteros and it is that view - the inside of their own mind during conception - that appears on canvas: the artist’s bubble.