Golf Course Illustration c. 1980s

This illustration, by Jack Davis, uses ink and watercolour to create a kind of organised chaos, where every character is full of energy and attitude. Look at how Davis uses line. It's so confident, almost like he's improvising, letting the ink dance across the page, defining these larger-than-life figures with just a few strokes. Then he floods everything with these vibrant washes of watercolour. The colours are bright, almost cartoonish, but they add to the chaotic charm of the scene. I love the kid fishing with a golf club! That one little detail, that kind of sums up the whole piece for me. It’s like a collision of worlds, golf and fishing, childhood and adulthood. Think of the painter, Philip Guston, he took cartoonish figures and made them symbols of something deeper. Davis does something similar here. He takes the everyday and twists it into something wonderfully weird. There's no right or wrong way to look at it. You just have to dive in and enjoy the ride.