With his hands and imagination, Minnesota artist Bud Chapman dabbed landscapes so believably unbelievable that golfers searched deepest Africa for a creation that existed only in his mind.
His inspiration: a love for golf and the harsh truth that he was flat broke. Now, 35 years after his first painting, Chapman is selling by Internet auction 77 original watercolors depicting fantasy golf holes from the Grand Canyon’s depths to Machu Picchu’s peaks. You can end the six-week auction early and purchase the collection today for $20 million.
Print copies of his paintings hang in golf clubhouses, on office walls and in dens around the world, but the originals have been kept safe all these years, except for brief display at an exclusive California country club last year.
A financial adviser suggested Chapman, 84, sell the collection for estate-tax reasons.
“I think it’s about time,” said Chapman, who has four children and nine grandchildren. “Even though my mother lived to 104, you just never know.”
He has loved the game since he was 11, when he first caddied at Interlachen Country Club in Edina, Minn. He’s a gifted golfer who led the 1983 U.S. Senior Open for its first 15 holes.
The Minnetonka, Minn., man still plays regularly — at Minneapolis Golf Club in summer, at a Florida club in winter — and has shot an 18-hole score better than his age 1,155 times. That is, unless he has already played this morning.
Smitten by sketching long before he hoisted a golf bag, Chapman inevitably transformed aptitude into a commercial-art career. In doing so, he developed a unique technique: With paint, he deftly retouched advertising photographs to make them look better than real life.
An idea out of the blue
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The arrival of computers rendered his brush obsolete. Business went bad. His investments went worse. Bankrupt and unsuccessfully searching for gold one day in the New Mexico mountains, an idea struck like a thunderbolt.
“Why not paint 18 of the greatest golf holes that nobody can conceive,” he asks now, “and paint them so real that nobody will even know if they’re real or not?”
Chapman said he awoke one night years later to a phone call from Zimbabwe.
The caller was asking for the exact location of the Victoria Falls Golf Club — the one with the opening short hole that plays across a misty chasm — because he couldn’t find it anywhere.
He said he has had seven-figure offers — Minnesota businessman Irwin Jacobs once inquired when he owned a golf company — to sell his originals before.
“The money doesn’t mean anything to me,” Chapman said by phone from St. Petersburg, Fla. “I’ve had a lot of money and lost it several times. If I had the money, I never would have painted these pictures. I’ve had more fun with these pictures than I could have had with $100 billion. I don’t like big houses. I like to play golf.”
Prefers one sale
There’s an undisclosed auction reserve price, below which he will not sell the collection. Chapman would prefer to sell all 77 paintings to one bidder and hopes the buyer agrees to display them publicly sometime in the next decade.
His sales agent said he expects offers from around the world, including a couple from Russia. A Chapman print hangs in the Moscow City Golf Club.
“People love these paintings,” said Vlad Gribovsky, owner of a Waconia, Minn., golf-accessory business who also is involved with building new courses in Russia. “Who buys ’em? Golfers, and golf courses. To see the original, it’d be like hanging the Mona Lisa. There’s a lot of Mona Lisas around, but there’s only one original, and that’s hanging in a museum.”
Nobody else is likely to dare compare a Loyal (Bud) Chapman — his given name, and nickname — original to Leonardo da Vinci’s gal. A recent news report that casino mogul Steve Wynn is suing for $54 million for his damaged Picasso painting led Gribovsky to say — presumably playfully — the auction’s $20 million buyout option is too low.
“They haven’t been in the market before,” said Don McNeil, a curator for General Mills and member at Minneapolis Golf Club. “What is somebody willing to pay for something? Ten years ago, you’d have found a Japanese guy who wanted to buy a golf course and put them up in his clubhouse. They’re not going up in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts or the Walker. It’s a hard thing to predict, but there’s all kinds of money around these days.”
Chapman has never been to Antarctica or Bavaria. He created most of the paintings by looking at photographs.
“I haven’t been out of the States,” he said. “If I sell them, I’ll have enough to go around the world and actually visit these places.”