(A Moment in) The Life of Brian

graphite & putty eraser/30x20cm

The latest in the series of (now long-former) footballer portraits sourced from the pages of a vintage 1970 annual, the drawing being processed with immediate reference to & thus guided by the surface aesthetic of an enlarged photocopy, somewhat degraded in quality from the original image as it appears in the book, itself obviously a reproduction of an original photographic print, thus furthering the levels of representation involved, with this of course being the on-screen presentation of a scan of the drawing: it’s a long way from the human subject standing before the camera & being photographed onto film sometime during the summer of 1970, & not just temporally.

Another familiar aesthetic aspect of the original photographs, & the reproductions of them in the book, in addition to those already noted (the subject squinting into the light, the sun-bleached, compressed tonal range), & to which the drawing remains faithful, is the particular cropping of the subject’s head, the squeezing of it into the picture frame, trimming away the top of it &/or (at least) the hairstyle, & often the ears/sides too: these are very much ‘mug shots’. Note also the preponderance of rather fine sideburns, in the style of the times.

As, coincidentally, with the previous example, the subject depicted is now deceased, lending a little more poignancy to the general air of nostalgia & ‘hauntology’, the drawing, as ever, a trace of a photographic trace, mediations on the ephemerality of physical phenomena & (states of) ‘being’.

In the now habitual manner of the wider process of such drawings’ making, research into the player’s career has revealed that, during a rather peripatetic course, Brian Lewis spent less than a year at Oxford United & made fewer appearances for them than any of his other clubs, having already moved on probably prior to the occasion when the majority of readers might have received & perused the annual in the gallery pages of which his image featured. Interestingly (at least to a football 'anorak'), it would appear, from the bare statistics, that the most productive phase of Brian Lewis’s career, at least in terms of a goals-to-games ratio, was the season-&-a-half he spent at Luton Town, from which club he joined Oxford & where he played on occasion alongside no less than the recently-drawn Graham French, the legendary subject of the first of this sequence of footballer portraits.