The Soft Wind Blows
Always a Hush Over the Crowd
Up on a hill the easy wind steadily blew, about as soft as the blades of green grass surrounding, which all collectively were even as soft as the childhood blanket outstretched for me there to make a temporary residence within its area.
Peacefulness flowed in and out of the four imaginary walls that came up from the perimeter of my blanket. The wind flowed just as freely and curled around my face as I sat with my mother nearby, holding my book of crossword puzzles that, as if it were a friend, itself, asked me again and again to bring my attention back to its pages, solving word after word by the clues it told me… almost as simply as I perhaps might’ve expected the mystery of this life to have been at the time.
It was my square of safety, that blanket… an imaginary room where my walls were invisible, my view was mostly predictable, and the sounds were calming to my soul.
From my little spot nestled between trees I could see hill after hill of green and many people quietly moving about—some camped out on their umbrella seats—but all of them becoming very still at once around the well-manicured flat surface of green below my hill… a hush rushing over them as if their whispers were already too loud for the sanctity of the landscape.
It seemed that with their collective breath held simultaneously they might have been waiting for some magic, some kind of elegance to unfold before them. The wind seemed to cease in those moments before I heard a distinct, “Whaap,” sound and a punctuation to the precipitating anticipation traveled to my senses in the most energetic way.
And then, a slight roar from the same pious followers all at once. The cumulative sound might have torn me momentarily from how my pen connected with my crossword puzzle, but most assuredly… peace was always the resounding feeling there in my room with invisible walls, surrounded by luscious green… Always there came again a breeze to cleanse me of all things in the moment of now—even though it was then—about 25 years ago.
All there ever is… is now, though, yes?
Understanding and also remembering how the mind is a much better servant than it is a master… All I need to do is consciously remember…. bringing myself to that place, on my blanket on a simple grassy hill… in the slight breeze… between the trees… and rest there… Infinitely, in my peace.
I went with my mother and father to the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill in the city of Orlando, Florida (where I grew up most of my life) year after year during the 1990s—before my transformation from tween into adolescence.
If you aren’t familiar with this annual event, it is an Official PGA Tour Professional Golf tournament held in honor of legendary golfer Arnold Palmer. It features the world’s best professional golfers competing for a prestigious title on the PGA Tour circuit.
I probably hadn’t fully grasped those details at the time and could not have exactly rattled off the aforementioned words, if you had asked me, as a child—except for maybe the names of all the players—which were household names in my personal experience as the daughter of an artist, one Mr. William Mix, who loved so much to express in art form his love of sport and passion for the game. Golf was yet another example of his admiration for sport and athletes found in the breadth of the body of artwork he created for over his lifetime.
My father not only played rounds of golf by himself on amateur courses from time to time but he avidly watched golf on television during his down-time from art. As I look back on it, maybe in his home studio during the years he used oil paints to create in an otherwise un-ventilated space… perhaps here and there he might have been a little too affected from the fumes. He watched golf often but I believe his watch-time were planned breaks away from his studio work.
I remember the sports commentators on the Masters Broadcast he watched, how they talked low, sometimes whispering on air during the 1980s holding steadfast to the tradition of keeping a quiet, respectful atmosphere. And then, in a rush of excitement for the sport… Everyone cheering and whistling, excitement all around. Today to pull up one such video nostalgia is to be pulled by an Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) directly back into that era at my kitchen counter while my father watched from the living room.
My father was an amateur photographer. While my mother and I held down the blanket on our grassy spot at Bay Hill, my father was off and about with his leather camera bag strapped around him. Here’s an example of a shot he was very pleased to get where Greg Norman saw him, in particular, and allowed a good photo to be taken:
The original drawing from this photo is too large to be scanned with the equipment I have for now, but here is William Mix’s note about taking the shot on the back of a drawing.
Golfers as athletes to my father were larger than life. And the print he made of Greg Norman from this shot was blown up to a fairly large size to correlate with that view, perhaps!
In his 400 handwritten pages that were an all-encompassing devotion to art as his spirituality, William Mix made mention of how he perceived most, if not all, of his human subject matter as heroes in some way.
As he painted, sketched, and drew homage to the persons he depicted in his vast body of artwork over such a wide array of subjects, series and sub-series, he wrote about a part of his natural and involuntary process when it came to view the heroic nature of his subjects: As he drew or painted, he was seeing parts of himself within the “hero,” he was rendering each time.
I’m definitely paraphrasing what he scribed onto paper about this, but I believe he wouldn’t mind me taking the liberty to have described it this way for my readers.
William Mix idolized professional golfers. I can trust in the most certain way that he saw them all as heroes, too.
Hurricane season 2024, just a some months ago as Milton was beginning to make landfall I had gone on a reconnaissance mission to my mother’s rental to save artwork from potential flooding. I will be honest to say I also went there to bring back my father’s ashes with me as well.
I had an idea this mission might require my duck-boots and to make a pit stop at Dollar General for a $5 rain-jacket. It was time to bring my father home with me and, unbeknownst to me… he guided me that day what other of his works would be important to bring along with us.
Not only was that the day and time I was divinely led to find the strategically tucked-away shoebox archive of my father’s best completed oil paintings and their two-page catalog—but there were several bags and boxes of artwork which spoke to me to bring them home.
I’ve been surrounded by these works from that day, since, but until now have not delved into any of the material brought back from that day. I am only beginning to sift through. Yesterday I finally opened the bag containing his Greats of Golf series.
There are so many different pieces. These are just a taste of his impressions of golf.
William Mix often crafted original bookmarks by mounting paper to posterboard and sometimes even mixing media around his original drawings. Below are a few examples of his Greats of Golf bookmark sub-series.
When I was old enough—maybe age 8 or so—my father sent me up to a particular location where the Player’s flock would move from one green to the next, previously had prompted me to approach really big name professional golfers and asking them for their autograph. I loved this challenge and wanted to do the best job I could with this task. If I caught them in just the right moment, how could they have said no?
William Mix used these autographs to mix media into his artwork sometimes for this series:
As you can see above, Ray Floyd signed on perhaps some random cardboard packaging from maybe a food item we had resource for his signature. I always wondered where all the other autographs went to as I remember my father giving me maybe $20 or $40 for the entire booklet of autographs I had gotten one year.
Well… I found them. Some of them. I’m sure there are more autographs hiding waiting to be excavated:
Here is another Greats of Golf Series bookmark. For this one, my father took a photo of a painting he had done of this professional golfer, Calvin Peete.
Here is a separate cut-out I found, a print of the photo he took of his Calvin Peete painting. In fact, this portrait of Calvin Peete… I am starting to get a deeper sense even as I type this and see the image as large as it is on my computer screen… I am willing to bet because of the background it was likely a composite of several other golfers in one painting.
This is a painting I do not ever recall seeing with my own eyes. This is one of the lost paintings… Or maybe it has been found, out there, somewhere. Very likely, though, my father probably gave it to a golfer, donated it to the country club at Bay Hill (or some other person or organization) where he might have felt it served a purpose.
There is so much more to scan and document about this series. It is truly a mystery how many of my father’s original oil paintings are out there, somewhere. I am always amazed when I go through a bag of artwork to find evidence of work that was created and perhaps still exist… Pieces I’ve never, ever seen before.
I always enjoyed the thought of being and archaeologist, but maybe this was the kind of digging I’m really meant to do for a while in my life. For now, though, I’ll take another gander at the painting depicting Arnold Palmer on the green and bring myself back again to my blanket on that peaceful grassy hill. You can find me there, until next time.
All the Love,
Colleen Noelle