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.
In a fine art golf world crowded with ultra-realistic renderings of the game’s notable playgrounds, Baysden’s versions of the same swirl with movement, light and color – almost impressionist in their ability to convey the mood, weather and mythic qualities of his subjects. His work calls to mind the luminous landscapes of 19th-century British Romantic-age painter J.M.W. Turner, works that tug on the emotions as well as the eye.
“I’m not sure I have a particular style,” Baysden allows with characteristic modesty, “because this is all still relatively new to me. What I simply try to capture is what I see and feel when I look at a golf course and other things in the game. People seem to like them.”
Indeed, they do.
His distinctive landscapes, illustrations and sketches have turned up lately on everything from the cover of the 2022 Presidents Cup program, where he served as the event’s official artist, to commercial golf-club headcovers and club logos, to tournament awards, underscored by a growing portfolio of major client commissions from leading private and public entities such as Pinehurst, Dormie Club, Ballyhack, Ohoopee, Old Town, Secession, Country Club of Detroit and a score of other signature clubs. His sketches for the likes of Bandon Dunes and Sweetens Cove, B. Draddy and MacKenzie golf bags speak eloquently about his visionary art’s broad appeal. Landscapes for Royal County Down, Tara Iti and Kauri Cliffs currently grace his studio easel.
Not bad for a kid nicknamed “Smiley” who grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, doodling in class and church because he believed it helped him concentrate. “I was born a natural doodler,” he says with a laugh. “That really bothered my teachers but, crazy as it sounds, doodling actually helped me pay better attention to what was going on in class. It’s the same now when I’m on a golf course – either doing a live sketch of folks at a tournament or just out on a golf course alone, looking and sketching what I see. My eyes and brain work through my hands. The images come through me to the paper that way. It helps me feel the landscape.”
This somewhat late-in-life gift comes naturally, he says, from his parents. Father, Ron, is a gifted career engineer for AT&T-BellSouth, and his mom, Carolyn, a lifelong artist. Ditto his sister, Cara, also a visual artist. “Dad is a brilliant engineer, very left brain, analytical and scientific, which was the path I naturally assumed I should follow. But my mother and her father both enjoyed painting, so that probably explains why the urge to visually create – to doodle at least – seized my brain early,” he speculates.
After taking a degree in biology at the University of South Carolina, Baysden entered grad school at UNC-Charlotte to earn a master’s degree in geography, which landed him in the planning and development department of a top engineering firm producing detailed maps for major highway projects. “I learned a lot in that job about how creativity could benefit an engineering environment. I drew landscapes from aerial photography that helped the engineers better envision what they were building. I loved the people. That’s why I stayed in it for 18 years.”
Providentially, however, two factors unexpectedly brought him into the world of golf. When his company announced a merger with another firm, he was basically left alone in a 6,000-square-foot space with a decreasing workload. “I knew my job was probably destined to be eliminated, so I set up an easel in an empty office and began to go over there to sketch and paint when things got slow. It felt so good, like something calling me back.” His early works were pastoral scenes of barns, fields, and even the odd golf course. Just for fun, he began putting them on Twitter.
“His paintings capture the soul of golf. When you look at his work, whatever the subject, you feel like you are really there with him. That sets him apart, in my view.” –Graylyn Loomis
Then, seemingly out of the blue, a pastor at his church in Charlotte invited him to participate in a special project involving several established artists painting scenes on a wall for the church’s Easter observance.
“These were top artists, mind you, some really talented folks, and I couldn’t believe he would ask me,” Baysden recalls. “I’d never painted anything that large and so public in my life. The fear of failure was pretty real. But terrifying as that was, I realized something had to get out.”
He credits friend and minister Steve Whitby for providing the push he needed. “Steve told me just not to say no. To be guided by faith. So I gave it a shot.”
Baysden’s painting of a man struggling to get free of vines that enwrap him – simply titled “Withering” – struck a powerful chord among those who saw it as a living metaphor for the human yearning for faith and freedom, a perfect Easter message of rebirth that was happening to the artist himself.
“The positive reaction of people who saw it – and the other artists — took me by surprise,” he said. “To tell the truth, I had no idea if it was good or not. But they seemed to really see something in my work. It got me thinking, eager to try more.”
As Baysden likes to say, that’s how art found him again. How golf found his art is the second part of this Cinderella golf tale.
One of those who saw his sketches online was Graylyn Loomis, one of golf’s leading influencers, an Asheville native who helped take his high school golf team to the state championship in 2010 and spent four years attending the University of St. Andrews, clocking more than 180 rounds on the Old Course between classes. Loomis’ passion for links architecture and love of golf culture led him to create a popular golf blog and travel newsletter read by thousands of classic golf nuts.
“I loved what I saw Dave was doing online and got in touch,” Loomis says. “His subjects were breathtakingly beautiful. They had such a natural feel, I just had to know who this guy was and where he came from.”
“I remember he said to me – Who are you?” Baysden remembers with a laugh. “We had a great conversation that changed my life.”
Loomis asked if he could interview Baysden for his blog and invited him to do a couple of watercolor paintings of St. Andrews and Cypress Point for his website.
“I was floored. I loved golf but had never done a painting of a course so large (12X16) before,” says Baysden. “It was kind of scary, but I was eager to try.”
“I simply told him a much wider audience needed to see his work,” Loomis notes. “I even offered to pay him, but Dave said he wouldn’t take any money. That’s how humble he is. I told him those days would probably be ending soon.”
Today, both paintings hang in Loomis’ home. “His paintings capture the soul of golf. When you look at his work, whatever the subject, you feel like you are really there with him. That sets him apart, in my view.”
Encouraged by the strong response to his work on the Loomis website, Baysden began posting a daily cartoon of whatever was happening in golf on Twitter, which landed him a gig as roving cartoonist at the PGA Tour Championship.
“It was an amazing experience. They told me to draw whatever caught my attention. I honestly didn’t even know what to charge them. That’s how inexperienced I was. But it was a blast – the first time I’d ever sketched and walked a golf course at the same time.”
One of the sketches he did at the Tour Championship at Atlanta’s East Lake Golf Club was a painting of Matt Kuchar’s headcovers which Seamus Golf had created.
For the PGA Merchandise Show the following winter, Seamus CEO Akbar Chisti commissioned Baysden to paint a 5-by-8-foot backdrop of the second hole at Old Macdonald at Bandon Dunes, which hung in the firm’s booth along with his painted headcovers. “I did the work in our garden shed,” Baysden explains, “because that became my studio at home where I could disappear and sketch and paint for hours without worrying about the mess.”
That same year, 2018, touring pro Zac Blair invited Baysden to come play and paint at his inaugural two-day event called “The Ringer” at Sweetens Cove in South Pittsburg, Tennessee. “Dave was really perfect for our event. He did a couple paintings that we auctioned off, and everyone loved his work,” Blair says.
“That’s really where I fell in love with playing the game again. I’d never actually walked a full golf course until Sweetens Cove,” Baysden said. “I saw the game in a new light, one where friends share their love of playing. It was true fellowship, an eye-opening experience.”
Not surprisingly, Blair became an enthusiastic friend and patron. “Dave’s art is extraordinary. I have an entire gallery wall of his work at home (in Utah) – not just golf art but also his river scenes, barns, and lots of other non-golf subjects. My mother has several of his paintings, too,” he says, pointing out Baysden has been the artist in residence at every subsequent “Ringer,” at the Dormie Club, Streamsong and Sand Valley.
Back home in his new studio in North Carolina – a spare bedroom with west-facing windows in High Point, his largest workspace ever – “Smiley the Doodler” finds himself hard at work on a stream of new projects – yet taking time to count his blessings.
“I’m still blown away by the generosity of the golf world, so grateful how this all happened,” he reflects. “My wife, Mandy, encouraged me at every step of the way and the golf world had been incredible. It’s a long game, as they say. I’m still learning, but that’s the beauty of the game. “There’s always something new that catches my attention. I see it,” he adds, still smiling, “and I want to paint it.”