Watch Her Fly

Four golfers stand on a field of yellow-green, seen from directly overhead, and the one at the top has just swung. Her club is still raised, her head tilted back, and everyone else has stopped to follow the ball. That shared upward stare is the whole story, which is where the title comes from. The three figures below are frozen mid-watch, leaning on their own clubs, and the painting hands you the moment right before anyone knows whether the shot was any good.

Werner Bronkhorst is a South African-born artist based in Australia who has built much of his work around this bird's-eye view, often painting golfers, swimmers, and beachgoers as tiny specks in huge expanses of colour. He builds the surface with thick paint pushed around by palette knife, which is why the grass here reads as sweeping bands rather than blades, echoing the stripes a mower leaves behind. The shadows do the heavy lifting: they stretch long and dark to the lower right, far bigger than the people casting them, telling you the sun is low and the round is nearly over. Strip away the figures and you would be left with an almost abstract field of green, which is probably half the point.