For the past five years, Philadelphia native Lee Wybranski has been painting the official posters used by the USGA to promote its signature event.
And now Wybranski, who has been living in Flagstaff for the past couple of years while keeping his Group W Art Works studio in Philadelphia, has made the full-time transition to northern Arizona.
“We came to Flagstaff a couple of years ago for family reasons, and I kept the business studio in Philadelphia for the first few years, and things have gone well so we decided it was time to move the whole shindig out here to be a part of the place,” Wybranski said during an interview at his downtown Flagstaff studio.
Wybranski has just finished the 2012 U.S. Open poster that will be the event's signature image, and he said the process has been quite a trip.
“I try to incorporate two or three main characters in the poster and limit them to that,” said Wybranski, who added he likes to make his posters bold and simple compositions. “With the U.S. Open posters, the main character is championship golf and usually there's some sort of local kind of aspect that adds interest. This year, that's the Cyprus trees.”
Wybranski said that to anyone, especially an East Coast guy like himself, the trees really stand out as a mystical and overpowering image that he couldn't not include in this year's poster.
He also added that he likes to incorporate a local landmark, and that this year's instructions from the USGA said to include San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.
“The painting themselves don't take terribly long, maybe about a week, but almost all the decisions are made before the painting even begins,” Wybranski said. “The decision-making process takes a long time with me and the client going back and forth with small tweaks and changes until I get final approval.”
Once Wybranski has the green light, he puts his watercolors to the canvas in his own unique style.
He doesn't like his posters to be very intricate with a lot of detail, and he said his background in painting posters tells him that they should be very bold and visible from a great distance.
Working with watercolors as his medium is also something that helps Wybranski with the poster-making process.
“One of the things I like is it allows for happy accidents to occur,” Wybranski said. “You can put one color next to another and sometimes they'll run together and make a magical blend that you'd never get otherwise. It's almost like watching Mother Nature busy at the work of creating.”
For the 2012 U.S. Open poster, Wybranski visited the Olympic Club in San Francisco last September to prepare for the project. He said he likes to spend a day or two taking photos and narrowing down his artistic vision with a camera before he puts paint to canvass.
“I really sketch a lot with the camera,” he said. “I know what's going to go on the poster eventually in my head, so I shoot a lot of pictures that leave a lot of pace for the typeface knowing how I want it to look.”
This year's poster is a bit unusual, as the view is from behind one of the greens looking back up at the tee with the Cyprus trees framing the fairway and the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.
Between Wybranski's love of golf—he gets the opportunity to play the U.S. Open courses once in a while—and his career as a painter, Wybranski has found the perfect niche in life.
“I knew coming out of art school that I wanted to make a career out of the arts,” he said. “Through some deliberate effort and also with some happenstance, I carved a niche out of the world of golf and it's just blossomed in ways I'd never have anticipated.”
Wybranski's first U.S. Open poster was for the 2008 event, and though he said it's difficult to choose, that poster is his favorite.
“Obviously you bring your best to each one, but the 2008 poster is a particular favorite, because of both aesthetic and emotional and business reasons,” he said. “That was my first U.S. Open posters, it's one of my favorite images I've ever made and it also happened to be for a historic event so the posters sold well.”
Wybranski said that as an artist, having such a large amount of people view his work in such a short period of time is one of the best ways to get his art and his name in the limelight.
“My first U.S. Open, the amount of people who saw and purchased my work, it was very gratifying,” Wybranski said. “I have a huge painting that I've spent over 135 hours on that would take years for 10,000 people to see. One of these posters, that only takes about a week to paint, gets huge viewership in three days. I knew since that first poster, I wanted to create images for the biggest events.”
Wybranski has now also broken the international art lines, as he was commissioned to paint the 2012 British Open poster as well.
“I have aspirations outside of golf as well, and there are many events that my work and my style would be a good fit, but in golf, I love the lore and history and mythology of the game so to be able to do work in the Old Country where it started was huge,” he said.
Wybranski will be hosting an open studio during Friday's Art Walk, and said that he's anticipating Flagstaff's art-loving crowds coming to see where his work is created.
“I'll be putting up work that I think will have the broadest appeal to people, and the work that I feel the best about and also the work that I like to see,” Wybranski said. “I don't like to work with a lot of my own things on the wall, I like to work surrounded by the things that inspire me, so some of that will be up.”
The 2012 posters won't be available until after the event, but all the previous year's posters are available on Wybranski's website, http://groupwartworks.com.
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Information from: Arizona Daily Sun, http://www.azdailysun.com/
Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-06-04-12 0803GMT
Source: acn.liveauctioneers.com
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