The Art of Gratitude

So why is Dave Baysden smiling?

On a beautiful late autumn day, he has just finished playing the final hole of a challenging Rees Jones course near his home in North Carolina, carding his lone double bogey of the round.

“Yeah,” he says with a carefree shrug, as he and his playing partners head for a beer in the clubhouse, “that was kind of disappointing, especially after one of my best rounds ever. But how can you not feel happy looking at that?”

He nods toward a fairway tumbling downhill to a slate-blue lake glittering in the long light of a golden afternoon, girdled by forests afire with color. “Looks like a painting, doesn’t it?” he muses. “I may have to come back and sketch that.”

Baysden is certainly qualified to do that. A youthful 46, this affable father of two and former engineering artist has quickly and quietly taken the golf world by storm with soulful paintings of some of the game’s most revered landscapes.

Commissioned re-creation of ...