graphite & putty eraser, with watercolour/30x20cm
Another return to previously-featured subject matter over this last week, but on this occasion with rather more of a purpose than would have incidentally been the case with any past instances as occurring during 2008’s Project of drawing from media image sources.
At that time, I mused upon the general paucity of football featuring as suitable subject matter for representation within the context of fine art &, indeed, despite a long-standing interest in the game, constant with certain fluctuations of intensity, it’s not something that’s particularly inspired me in creative terms, at least since after childhood & the serious study & continuing practice of art.
However, a certain correspondence of recent circumstances seems to have ignited a little flicker of possibility for the production, for now, of some drawing based upon archive photographs of professional football match action as found in a small (but perfectly formed) selection of late 1960s – early 1970s annuals that have come into my possession of late: rather serendipitously, this covers the latter half of the period about which I always seem to have been most nostalgic, both in general socio-cultural terms & specifically in relation to football, despite it immediately pre-dating the time at which I began following the game in earnest.
The annuals themselves are full of the black & white photography of the time that lends a particular glamour to the action & the portraits of the players featured within, & it is these images that will provide the source material for the drawings, a series of, as imagined & intended.
As always, aside from this especial ‘period’ aesthetic quality, another aspect of the appeal of such images is their capture of movement, of human bodies & objects, frozen in time, emphasizing the instantaneous nature of the ‘photographic moment’, with the drawing process from any such source then in turn emphasizing its difference from via the medium of the explicit, discrete marks made, each of which has its own temporality embedded within, the accumulation of marks in any given drawing communicating a sense of the passage of time involved in its construction - quite literally ‘marking time’, it might be said.
Again, the still-nascent concept of ‘de-photography’ comes to mind, & how the (slowness of the) drawing process embodies this, particularly, perhaps, from such sources as images depicting action in the manner of the football matches.
Further to the practice of ‘de-photography’, the drawing is the product of details appropriated from two source images, thus depicting an incident that never actually took place, revising (photographic) history along the way.
The design of the back cover of the 'All Stars' annual, featuring an ink-drawn representation of a pair of footballers in action only served to provide more inspiration, as might be appreciated...
By way of further explication of the overall appearance of the drawing, the acquisition of the football annuals happened to coincide with the decision to invest in the rather wonderful ‘Own Brand’, a visual history of the work of Sainsbury’s in-house design studio, the results of which, obviously, went on to grace the packaging of their own brand range of goods & products, not least those as appeared on the stores’ shelves during the halcyon days of the 1960s & 1970s, many a delightful example of which is represented within the pages of this handsome volume: the keen viewer might appreciate how the cover design itself, visually quoting as it does a classic Sainsbury’s ‘cornflakes’ packet design of the author’s fond recollection, influenced the design aspect of the football drawing, the arrangement of circles suggesting the faces of the crowd as seen, en masse & homogenized out of focus, as the background to the on-pitch action in the archetypal football match photograph.
By one of those serendipitous quirks, this particular aspect was in fact that upon which I must have concentrated, recalling the drawing I made based on the very first televised football match I ever showed an interest in, the 1974 FA Cup Final, obsessively recording a multitude of pink felt-pen circles representing what appeared the vast crowd at the expense of drawing the Newcastle United team’s shirts with horizontal rather than their correct vertical black & white stripes, as my father critically observed later!
On the subject of aesthetic influence as it pertains to the current drawing, another recent addition to the library shelves happens to be ‘Match Day’, an illustrated survey, ‘from Post-war to Premiership’ (i.e. 1992) as it’s subtitled, & celebration of football programme cover design, featuring all 92 Football League clubs & some additional examples from ‘non-league’, coincidentally also published, as the Sainsbury’s book, by Fuel. Again, such a volume presents a veritable cornucopia of delights of graphic design, some of a higher standard than others, very often incorporating photographic images of football action, as one might imagine, both something of a nostalgia-fest & grist to the creative mill under the present circumstances.
Soundtrack:
Belle & Sebastian 'Write About Love'
Galaxie 500 'The Peel Sessions'
Dome '1 & 2'
Moon Wiring Club 'Shoes Off and Chairs Away'
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