Portrait of Ernie Els

portrait of Ernie Els by Steven Anthony Salerno visit sasgolf.com

I recently completed a small portrait of World Golf Hall of Fame golfer, South African Ernie Els... shown hoisting the Claret Jug upon winning the 2012 Open Championship at Royal Lytham & St. Annes, his fourth major championship victory. Now being the holder of four majors places Mr. Els into pretty rare company, as only 27 players in the entire history of the game have ever won four or more major championships. (and we all know that Jack Nicklaus hold the record with 18 majors and Tiger Woods is in a not so distant second with 14 majors)

I created this portrait painting using pencil, crayon, acrylics and gouache on Arches 260 lb hot press paper. In 2012 I had completed a series of "signature hole" golfscape paintings for Ernie Els Design (his golf course architecture company) which you can view at sasgolf.com in the Ernie Els project section.

I usually prefer doing "swing portraits" of players, rather than straight forward "portraits" simply because I enjoy expressing my knowledge of the golf swing and also capturing the unique look of an individual's swing... but in this instance, I actually could not locate sufficient reference photos to my liking of Mr. Els in action during the final round of the 2012 Open Championship... but the multitude of photos of him after winning and hoisting the Claret Jug caught my eye, as they radiated his sheer joy in winning his 4th major championship. So I used about 5 different photos as reference to construct my own art image... simplifying and editing out folds and wrinkles in clothing, adding or eliminating shadows, repositioning his pose, etc... all the multitude of actions required when using static photo reference to create an organic drawing and painting artwork. 

Visit sasgolf.com to view all my available limited edition golf art prints.