Returning to the series of drawings based upon photographic portraits of footballers as found within the pages of a 1970 soccer annual, with enlarged & somewhat degraded-in-image-quality photocopies serving as the immediate visual reference from which the drawing is/was processed. Although in pure terms the visual subject matter is not the determining factor in the drawing, mark-making process - the act of & the recording of it, the traces the temporal & physical activity leaves behind in material form is, rather – still such imagery, iconography, serves a nostalgic purpose & is thus not without its own significance.
As has become habitual, a little light research into the playing career of the portrait subject Eric Skeels was undertaken, revealing him to have been a great stalwart of Stoke City, making a record number of 592 appearances for the club between 1959 – 1976 (their very own ‘Mr Dependable’), thus into the period when my interest in football began & developed, being a name, indeed, I recall from that youthful time, without being aware of the full details & significance of the scope of Eric’s commitment to the cause.
Given the 1970-vintage of the source image, it was interesting then to find further images of the estimable Mr Skeels across a range of years, from earlier in his Football League career to its twilight, but more than that it was particularly so to discover evidence on a football memorabilia website of an autographed example of a copy of the very same image from which the drawing is sourced, clearly, given its format & presentation, as featured in that same 1970 – 71 edition of ‘Charles Buchan’s Soccer Gift Book’ as has come into my possession & also, then, a representation of the original full-person colour photographic image from which the portrait as it appears in the annual has evidently been cropped: both of these images are presented below.
Towards the end of his career, in the mid-Seventies, a then decidedly craggy-looking Eric took to sporting very much the classic Peter Wyngarde ‘Jason King’ look, a comparison too good not to make & present, all in the interests of an abiding cultural interest in the history of men’s grooming, of course: quite remarkable. There’s a certain sense of nostalgia, too, present within the image taken from ‘Shoot’ magazine, in considering that I might well have owed a copy of the very issue in which it appeared, & thus the poster itself, being of a collector of the publication during that era – indeed, given my tendency at the time, it might well have formed part of the collage of such indiscriminately papering my bedroom walls. That ‘Admiral’ brand sash-designed shirt is so redolent of those times too, such imagery really is fertile hauntological ground…
As too are such period team photographs, not least as presented in the form of ‘Ty-Phoo’ tea cards...
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