I first encountered artist Lee Wybranski at the US Open at Shinnecock Hills earlier this summer and immediately loved his work. I met him once again at the U.S. Amateur at Merion a few weeks ago.
At Merion, we had a chance to talk. While I certainly enjoyed chatting with him and appreciated some of his parenting advice, his work stuck with me. I bought two prints, framed and hung them up in my home, and kept thinking about why I liked them so much.
Lee grew up in Havertown, only a few miles from Merion, and I happened to grow up not far from the course either. I would drive by the links in my teens when I was learning to drive, so attending this tournament in my hometown was special and felt a bit like a homecoming.
Lee is one of the best-known and most celebrated artists working in golf today. His paintings have been used for U.S. Opens and other major golf championships for years. But I kept coming back to his new print of Merion; maybe growing up nearby had something to do with it. The famous red wicker baskets in place of traditional pin flags, the historic clubhouse, Philadelphia in the background—it was all familiar, but Lee had put it together in a way that immediately took me home.
His image for this year’s U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills centers on the club’s famous shingled clubhouse, designed by Stanford White in the 1890s, set against the native grasses and huge Long Island sky. You don’t need the words “Shinnecock Hills” to know where you are.
For the U.S. Amateur Championship at Merion, Lee made the red wicker basket on top of the flagpole enormous and not remotely to scale. While other local elements are in the image, your eye goes right to the basket and this makes sense, for those baskets are Merion. In fact, anyone who wins a USGA event at Merion receives a wicker basket top as a trophy.
In doing some reading about Lee and his career, I learned that while working on a course guide for Merion years ago, Lee spent three days exploring Merion’s East Course and took notes on “every bump and ripple.” I love this attention to detail. Before Lee paints, he clearly spends a lot of time getting to know his subject—its history along with the unique details and little things someone else might miss.
Lee’s approach toward real, historical details matters now, for so much of what we encounter today looks the same. Drive around and you see the same style of stores, restaurants, apartment buildings and hotel lobbies. I see it even in New York, where neighborhoods that once felt very different increasingly don’t, and restaurants and stores come in predictable multiples. Many of the new builds are perfectly nice, but sometimes you can look around and have very little sense of where you actually are.
These ideas about place are not new but worth remembering—noted geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has argued that space becomes place when people give it meaning. For Tuan, a space becomes a place because of what happens to us there. Over time, the physical surroundings become bound up with our memories of it.
Golf makes this unusually easy to see. Shinnecock has its grasses and Stanford White’s clubhouse; Merion has its wicker baskets. Augusta National has Amen Corner and its stone bridge; Pebble Beach has the Lone Cypress, which I loved visiting in college with my dad when he visited. They are part of what you remember about being there.
Before becoming a golf artist, Wybranski made architectural drawings, and one of the questions that led him toward golf was where people have strong emotional attachments to buildings. Golf clubs were one answer, but I kept asking the question: why should a clubhouse, a tree, or a wicker basket matter?
It’s the same reason we care so much about a diner we have gone to for years, a ballpark, a church, a main street, or the house where we grew up.
Part of it is memory and experience. I have my own memories of Merion and Pebble Beach, just as so many other people have theirs of Shinnecock or Augusta. The basket, the tree, the clubhouse—after a while these aren’t just things you see. They remind you of being there.
And I think that gets me closer to why I bought and love Lee’s work. I didn’t want a generic golf print on the wall. I wanted Shinnecock and Merion. I know Merion. Lee knows Merion too.
I no longer live anywhere near Merion, but his prints are on display in my home office. Merion, in a small way, is now with me at home too.