'Here Are the Young Men'...

Further to the series of drawings based upon reference to portrait photographs of then-contemporary footballers as found within the pages of a 1970-vintage ‘Charles Buchan’s Soccer Gift Book’, as currently being processed, at this point of the ‘project’ as it’s developing it’s interesting to collect together the portraits drawn thus far & arrange them in a grid format in order to consider the intended cumulative effect of the series. Composed thus, the images appear in similar fashion & proximity to each other as they do upon the page(s) of the Annual from which the original photographic portraits are sourced, whilst also recalling, in nostalgic manner, the pages of, for instance, a Panini or other publisher sticker album or, indeed, an album of similarly (& addictively, pocket money-draining) collectable ‘cigarette’-type cards of the type illustrated in the recent Bob(by) Gough entry.

In the habitual contextual manner, such a cumulative series, produced with reference to photographic source material, also relates to another such as Gerhard Richter’s ’48 Portraits’ of historically eminent German men & particularly, as mentioned previously upon discovering them, Alan Brooks’ two series of pencil drawings of ‘influential authors’ & ‘artists in their studios’, or indeed any similar endeavour: one might also consider Warhol’s ‘Thirteen Most Wanted Men’, for example, sourced from a particular publication as are the footballer drawings.

For whatever reason, & without necessarily considering a title for the collected series of portraits, the opening refrain ‘Here are the young men...’ from Joy Division’s ‘Decades’ frequently recurs; there’s a certain poignancy, perhaps, in contemplating that the source photographs are now more than 40 years old & those subjects that are still with us (at least a couple of departures having been acknowledged, of course) that much older, even those who might only have been late teens or early twenties then into their sixties now, for all that the photographs (& the drawings from the printed reproductions of) freeze them at a certain moment in & (stylistic) period of time: the images serve as hauntological manifestations, traces, memorials, of other times & places - those, personally, just beyond the boundaries of memory & yet redolent & with a powerful ‘idealistic’ attraction.