38 ARCHITECTURAL ARTWORK Left, ‘Course Design Collage - Dye Designs Internship’, Don Placek, 1990 (Image: Don Placek) I was out on a golf course as often as time would allow! “My parents always influenced and encouraged my interest. But a good deal of inspiration came from the drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright, particularly his concept sketches. Full of detail but still rough around the edges. Also, there was the late Ann B. Timbermann who worked with Perry O. Dye, Pete’s son, at Dye Designs in Denver, Colorado, as his art and image director when I interned there during my senior year at University of Colorado, Boulder. “I suppose my drawings have played a role in several capacities over the years – early in my career for Tom Doak my work was used to get clients to envision how a hole might look ahead of construction and as a sales pitch too. As Tom’s career exploded there was no need for that for long! And he didn’t like the idea that a client would latch on to how something was ‘supposed to look’, as it handcuffed him in the field where his live ideas and edits are the essence of his work and what makes his designs what they are! Over the last ten or so years clients have commissioned me to produce stylised drawings of their courses in an as-built form... along with hole-by-hole illustrations, yardage books, trophy prints and the like.” Like Strantz, David Kahn began his career in the Fazio organisation. He has drawn and painted for considerably longer though. “I have always been both artistically inclined and a golfer,” he says. “I started playing golf at 18 months old and was drawing/painting not terribly long afterwards. When I was seven, I vividly remember merging the two together. I would get in trouble at school for not paying attention; instead drawing golf holes in my notebooks. “As a kid, I loved Picasso. I would emulate his quirky style all the time and even teachers started to take notice – I only learned that as an adult when my parents told me. Throughout college I was influenced by the artistic hands of many structural architects and city planners, notably Frederick Law Olmsted and Frank Lloyd Wright. I studied books on sketching and simply tried to copy the different styles and see which one came more naturally. Eventually a morphing of everything I consumed led to how I draw, and honestly that is continually evolving. “In the early days of Jackson Kahn, my artwork got people to stop and listen to us. Without those visuals we might not have landed some of our first jobs. Being able to communicate a vision that is in your head is a thousand times more powerful with a graphic than with words. Words can be mistranslated, while a picture is clearly communicated.
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