Golf - yellow on green Painting

Theory and Practice…In this new serie of paintings, I tried to illustrate, to balance THEORY and THOUGHT with PRACTICE and FEELING… Theory and practice… or either theory or practice? And in which order? Learning THEN doing, playing, living? Or learning BY doing, playing, living? These questions bring back to innate and acquired, to nature and culture. To do, to learn to do, should we listen to others, the eldest, the experts ? Should we dive into books ? Or is it wiser to try by ourselves, by making our own experiences and mistakes? I use golf to explore these questions : a sport which is a model of life "They say golf is like life, but don't believe them. Golf is more complicated than that" Gardner Dickinson)… a sport in which tempers, qualities and defaults unfold ("Eighteen holes of match play will teach you more about your foe than 18 years of dealing with him across a desk" Grantland Rice)… addictive because it is a the same time difficult and technical but also fun and even orgasmic… an activity where the conflicts between thought and feeling, between learning and fun, between theory and practice are at their maximum... Maybe this explains why you can hear so many pieces of advice around the golf courses. But those might not be always as informed as they should and we’d better remember the advice of Bagger Vance (Will Smith) to Rannulph Junuh (Matt Damon) in “The legend of Bagger Vance”, the Robert Redford movie : “Feel the swing... Seek it with your hands... Don't think about it... Your hands are wiser than your head ever gonna be...”