The golfers who finished their round while a forest burned

Incredible photos of calm against an inferno emerged this week. Kelly Grovier looks at images of tranquility in the face of chaos.

After being struck by lightning during a tournament in 1975, the American golfer Lee Trevino offered some advice to anyone who might find themselves caught on a golf course during an electrical storm: “Hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron.” Perhaps it’s the goofy trousers, but golf has a history of generating witty remarks. And some soulful ones too. “Of all the hazards,” golf legend Sam Snead once said – blurring the distinction between contours of the landscape and undulations of the mind – “fear is the worst”.

Snead’s sage words seem to have seeped deep into the consciousness of a group of golfers photographed this week playing a round at the Beacon Rock Golf Course in North Bonneville, Washington, while a devastating wildfire raged in the tree-lined hills behind them. The striking image of intrepid players putting calmly against an apocalyptic backdrop has been shared widely on social media.

Beacon Rock Golf Course/Facebook

Such calm amidst danger provoked a flurry of droll comments (“I hope,” quipped one user, “the fire engulfs everyone playing with their shirt untucked. There, I said it.”), and some thoughtful ones too. “In the pantheon of visual metaphors for America today,” tweeted the writer and producer David Simon, “this is the money shot”.

Whether one sees the encroachment of flames as emblematic of intensifying global crises (from North Korea to Venezuela, from the path of hurricane Irma to the violence in Myanmar) or whether one perceives it instead more intimately as a simile for inner turmoil, the poise of the putters playing tranquilly is curiously captivating. The friction of exterior menace and interior self-possession has sparked great art.

Creative Commons

In 1886, the whirlingly turbulent mind of Vincent van Gogh was drawn to the calm of Eugene Delacroix’s painting Christ Asleep during the Tempest, when the post-Impressionist encountered it in Paris. Amid a riot of squalling waves and shrieking disciples, Christ dozes on unperturbed. Desperate to stop the sextant of his own stormy mind from spiralling out of control, Van Gogh was understandably seduced by the serenity of Delacroix’s depiction of Christ’s cool consciousness, which, he believed, spoke “a symbolic language” to him “through colour”.

Van Gogh was especially preoccupied with the lemon yellow of Christ’s halo which must have seemed to him to form a barrier between mind and matter, composure and fear. Fast forward a couple of years to the painting of Van Gogh’s own mesmerically agitated and agitating Starry Night in 1889, and the halo’s glow in Delacroix’s painting appears refracted into a shatter of shuddering stars, each vibrating fiercely. Some minds are more composed with danger bearing down on them. Some have no choice but to let the fire play through.

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