Lee Wybranski paints a vivid image of the last time the Open Championship went to Royal Troon, in 2016 with Henrik Stenson and Phil Mickelson locked in an intense record-setting shootout in the final round. Literally, Wybranski paints that picture. He was right there inside the ropes adjacent to the famous Postage Stamp par-3 eighth hole, painting the scene when the protagonists came through.
“I did this little piece with Sky Sports while I was over there. I was painting the eighth green – the Postage Stamp hole – inside the ropes while the golf was playing and they were filming me,” Wybranski said. “We did this little thing where they filmed a little bit at the start of the painting and then at the end of the painting, but I was actually sitting there painting when Phil and Henrik played through the hole. It was pretty amazing.”
Wybranski will be back at Royal Troon this week, in the merchandise tent signing the latest Postage Stamp poster he created as the official artwork for the 152nd Open Championship. It’s a gig the 54-year-old has repeated at every major championship and Ryder Cup in recent years, selling the official reproductions that adorn the walls of golf enthusiasts across the world.
If you attended the recent championship at Pinehurst No. 2 and walked through the main merchandise pavilion, you probably saw Wynbranski there chatting and signing away thousands of official posters for the 124th U.S. Open. It was the poster with the rocking chairs on the Pinehurst clubhouse porch overlooking the Payne Stewart statue and the 18th green. It’s the most popular poster Wybranski has sold since he got into the official golf poster game in 2007.
“Probably somewhere between three and four thousand,” he said of the number of posters he signed during his 11 days onsite. “It was a lot. It was our best seller ever; took the top spot. Certainly, for the championship days, I literally had lines from the moment I sat down at 7:15 in the morning until 7:30 at night, there were people waiting for me to sign a poster. It was pretty special.”
Wybranski’s poster work has become ubiquitous in golf circles, but it took him a while to get where he is the most prominent golf artist in the game.
Wybranski hit on the right image for Pinehurst – one that really connected with patrons.
“People loved it. I can’t tell you how many people came up … literally thousands of people told me that they’ve sat in those chairs and watched the 18th,” he said. “And especially the members. They all sit there and drink Transfusions and bet on whatever foursome is finishing on 18 – you know, who’s going to three-putt and who’s going to get up and down, all that kind of stuff. So it really resonated. And you know the Payne Stewart statue was kind of a no-brainer to include, given that it’s kind of not only an homage to Payne but obviously to the championship itself. So, it did seem to really move the needle with everybody.”
Wybranski’s poster work has become ubiquitous in golf circles, but it took him a while to get where he is the most prominent golf artist in the game.
The Philadelphia native graduated from Syracuse University in 1991 with a degree in art and little idea what to do with it. “I wasn’t a vocationally oriented person at that time. I just knew I wanted to somehow make a living making pictures,” he said.
After school, he stumbled onto an opportunity to do pen-and-ink architectural drawings of estates and institutions on the Main Line outside of Philadelphia. “It kind of woke up an entrepreneurial part of me that I wasn’t really aware of,” he said. “I mean, my original vision was just to, you know, do a half a dozen drawings, sock away a couple of grand and buy a Euro pass and hit the road.”
How could he and his partner at the time make this skill work on a larger scale and sell reproductions? And who might have an emotional enough connection to buildings that they’d be willing to pay for it?
“Our answers to that were college campuses and golf and country clubs, and I just really wasn’t that interested in going back into the college environment,” he said.
Wybranski didn’t have any real history with golf. He was “a terrible caddie” at a club one summer growing up, but he didn’t play and had no real positive associations with the game. But they began showing their architectural drawing portfolio around high-end clubs in the New York Metropolitan Section.
“Only a top-level club is going to be interested in investing in artwork of itself,” he said.
Winged Foot was his first commission for a sketch of its clubhouse, and that opened doors at other clubs in the Northeast including Ridgewood, National Golf Links, Caves Valley and Salem. Wybranski was in the door.
“All the drawings I did for that first couple of years in golf, they were all just clubhouses,” he said of his black-and-white sketches.
Eventually someone asked if he could work in more color and do golf course landscapes as well, to which he said, “Sure, I can do that.”
“Then I’d teach myself how to paint,” he said, conceding that he went through six attempts at painting the exact same scene of the second hole at Caves Valley before he created one that he was confident enough to show his client for a fall member event.
Wybranski didn’t say no to any requests, reasoning that he could figure out how to do whatever was asked. When one of his early clients went to Atlantic City Country Club, he asked if Wybranski could help design a new club logo and branding and yardage books.
“I figured out how to do it, and within a year of that I was doing logos for golf clubs,” he said. “So by that point, I was doing the drawings, the paintings, the logos, graphic design, yardage books, scorecards. We kind of became this one-stop shop of a studio for artwork and design. … We just brought, like, traditional aesthetics back to all these printed collateral pieces.”
To reach a broader audience beyond individual clients, Wybranski needed something different. Inspired by the golden age of artistic posters in the 1920s – think travel posters for France and Italy; railway posters in Britain; propaganda posters in Russia and China; or national parks and Works Project Administration posters in the U.S. – he figured that was the way to reach a wider base of consumers. His golf landscapes inspired by Edward Hopper, marketing savvy inspired by LeRoy Neiman and a mantra inspired by Bob Dylan – “basically all art is theft” – he set about trying to expand into the poster game.
“A lot of people call what I do vintage or retro, but I don’t really think of it that way,” he said. “I’m not really trying to make it look old-fashioned. I just feel like I build things on sort of sound traditional fundamentals, and if that gives them a look that people think of as vintage, you know, that’s fine with me.”
Again his former clients came through for him to launch his poster art. His first event poster was for the 2001 Senior PGA Championship at Ridgewood. Then the 2002 U.S. Senior Open at Caves Valley, which caught the eye of USGA merchandising director Mary Lopuszynski, who hired him to do U.S. Open logos in 2004-07. The USGA’s policy for U.S. Open posters, however, was to commission local artists.
“It makes a lot of sense, but it also yields sporadic results,” Wybranski said. “Some years the poster was dynamite and some years maybe not as strong. I just said, ‘Look, give me a shot. We’ll make it great. And we’ll make it great every year.’”
After he did the poster for the inaugural AT&T National hosted by Tiger Woods at Congressional Country Club in 2007, the USGA decided to give him that shot at the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines. It turned out to be an epic championship, with Woods winning in a 19-hole playoff with a stress fracture in his left leg.
Wybranski did not throw away his shot.
“That poster … it’s still one – if I had to pick one favorite thing I’ve ever done, it might be that just because it was the right thing at the right time and it really changed everything in terms of my career,” he said. “It’s a really simple but strong image. There’s golf in there, but the golf isn’t like screaming at you.
“We sold like three times as many posters as they usually did that year. It was just one of those perfect storms. I used to think how well we sold was all about the image, but I’ve since learned that you need a lot of other things to do really well … good weather, the Open going to a course or a region where either hasn’t been for decades or has never been.
“So that first year, the U.S. Open hadn’t been in Southern California in 50 years and California is as stocked with golfers as anywhere in the country, and most of them are affluent. And then you add Tiger to the mix, and I did make one of the best images I’ve ever made. It was one of those rare instances where I brought my ‘A’ game to my ‘A’ course.”
Wybranski has done every U.S. Open poster since.
He started doing the Open Championship posters in 2012 at Royal Lytham, the PGA Championship posters in 2013 at Oak Hill and (based on his imagery on his website since he’s not at liberty to discuss anything about Augusta National) the Masters along with the Ryder Cup in 2016.
“I half-jokingly say, it’s the only place in America where the men out-shop the women 5 to 1.” – Lee Wybranski
The next stop on the Ayrshire Coast this week will be selling posters to an audience that’s typically more frugal than the U.S. Open crowds who embraced his work so enthusiastically at Pinehurst.
“Even our best Opens, they’re nothing like the numbers we do at the U.S. Open just because, well, it’s not as commercial of a culture over there,” he said. “People don’t need to buy tons of stuff whenever they go somewhere. I mean, the majors in America are just so well designed by the merchandisers. I half-jokingly say, it’s the only place in America where the men out-shop the women 5 to 1. It’s a very well-designed shopping experience.”
He paints a picture that patrons can take home to remind them of whatever history transpires on the course.
Lee Wybranski’s artwork and merchandise are available HERE.