From his early days reading The Beano and The Dandy, in awe of the artists who created those iconic characters, to a career as an art teacher and then capturing images of golf’s greatest players, Joe Austen has always had art at the centre of his world.
The avuncular artist is celebrating 50 years of golf portraiture and 40 of working closely with the Rusacks Hotel in St Andrews, the home of golf, where many of his paintings are on display.
Comic inspiration
Thinking back to his artistic roots, Joe says: “when I was a little boy I copied drawings from The Dandy and The Beano. In my eyes Dudley D. Watkins (who created enduring comic characters such as Lord Snooty and Desperate Dan) is a supreme genius and the ultimate inspiration.”
Hooked on the idea of drawing and illustrating, Joe went on to study drawing and painting at Duncan of Jordanstone before embarking on a teaching career.
He specialised in teaching art to children with learning difficulties and went on to create and produce children’s television programmes and write and illustrate books for young children.
His love affair with golf portraits came later, when he had an art gallery in Greyfriars Garden in St Andrews. “I did miniature portraits inside sea shells,” he recalls, “then I did the huge World of Golf picture.”
A meeting with Mark McCormack of IMG opened doors to some of the biggest names in golf and Joe’s work has also been on show at various Open competitions.
His paintings are also on display in clubhouses and hotels in Europe, Japan and America and feature in private and corporate collections the world over.
Displayed world-wide
When it comes to putting brush to canvas, Joe’s medium of choice for his golf portraits is always oil paint, which helps add weight to the strongly realistic images that he creates. All his pictures, however, have their foundation in the structure that he puts in at the drawing stage.
“Inspired by the great Dudley Watkins, good drawing is the basis of everything,” he points out.
He works from photographs to achieve his portraits: “You have to work from photographs but the painting gives it a quality that it otherwise wouldn’t have had – a dimension that a photograph can’t quite capture.”
Enthusiastically received
Joe has always been delighted by the reception that his portraits have received from their subjects and many golfers have made the trip to the hotel to autograph their pictures.
He is proud to say that he is on friendly terms with some of those great names, referring to Tony Jacklin in particular. Joe worked with Tony, who is renowned as Europe’s most successful Ryder Cup captain, on a collection of portraits of some of the greatest Ryder Cup players.
Joe also talks fondly of the wonderful Arnold Palmer who loved St Andrews and the Rusacks.
“This was his hotel, he loved the Rusacks,” says the artist. “When he was kind enough to sign the portrait I was very pleased that it would remain here in the hotel.”
Visitors to The Rusacks can now see Joe’s artwork throughout the recently extended and refurbished hotel, with individual Open champions depicted on the walls of the ground floor. Upstairs, diners in rooftop restaurant, 18, can look up from their meal to view some of Joe’s most impressive works. The large-scale painting The World of Golf measures a huge 5m x 4m (16ft x 9ft) and features depictions of 32 golfers who have made an impact on golf and on The Open in particular, from its creation in 1860 until 1975.
Other large canvasses include action portraits of Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, who was recently made a Citizen of St Andrews.
Two new original oil paintings have been added to the collection at the Rusacks since it reopened. They have joined Joe’s well-known depiction of Old Tom Morris in the hotel reception. The first picture is of Wilhelm Rusack, who created the hotel in 1887. He and Old Tom sit either side of a view of Rusacks St Andrews from the Old Course with the famous Swilken bridge in the foreground.
A fitting tribute to Joe’s continued relationship with the home of golf, those who love to play there and The Rusacks Hotel.
