Seven Putters

Limited Edition Print
Edition of 950 S/N
Image: 20″ x 26.5″
Overall: 24″ x 30″
$100

75 Artist Proofs available with original watercolor remarques.
$250

A few years back I did my second major golf still life painting and subsequent print. It was called “Legends,” and it sold out almost as quickly as my first golf print “From Blackheath to Augusta.” Both of these pieces were carefully researched and put together, but it was some time later when I came up with the idea for this piece, “Seven Putters.”

I had collected a couple of old wooden shaft clubs and I did some studies of one or two of them on a shelf or on pegs on a wall. About that time I had a Twenty Year Retrospective show in a museum and a painting of two putters on a wall was one that attracted a lot of comment, mostly from golfers who simply could not believe that the clubs were not real until they reached out and actually touched the flat surface of the painting. It was classic response to a successful trompe l’oeil (fool the eye) painting. The idea for this painting grew from that: if two putters worked, why not five or six? Or SEVEN?”

Once again I called upon a couple of friends with great collections of golf memorabilia and asked to borrow some old putters, and they readily complied. Some of those putters were extremely rare and valuable, and I was a bit nervous about having them in my studio, especially when Hurricane Fran sent a large tree limb through my studio roof. Luckily, the painting was nearly finished at the time and I had moved it and anything else of value out of the studio the morning before the storm hit.

The seven putters in the painting are from top to bottom: an early MacGregor brass-head; an ‘Aberdeen;’ a Spalding ‘Morristown’ putter, which is probably the most valuable of the seven; a wooden-headed putter from St. Andrews; an early Wright & Ditson dot-punched putter; a ‘Mills’ aluminum head; and a Hillerich & Bradsby ‘Lo-Skore.’ The ‘pegs’ in the wall are actually golf tees. I added a couple of old cigarette cards just for the fun of it and a spot of color. This has also been a very successful print and I expect it to be sold out soon.