Old School #1

Following on from the example of the previous drawing processed with the novelty of coloured pencils, presenting another portrait of a former footballer of a 1970s vintage, with, on this occasion, the source image dating from the middle of the decade rather than the beginning as was the case with the recent series of portraits. Courtesy of the visual resources available via the delightfully nostalgic ‘Old School Panini’ website, we now foray into Europe & particularly, the French League, where a rigorous selection of handsomely-moustachioed players circa 1976 has provided the ‘squad members’ for what is intended to be a project-within-the-project.

coloured pencil/30x20cm

Beginning, naturally, in goal, the first subject, our Number 1, is one Louis Landi, of Nimes, as the text that forms an aspect of the picture plane informs, the composition following the design of the sticker upon which the photograph would have appeared back in the day & is represented on ‘Old School Panini’, the drawing thus being a scaled-up hand-made re-mediation in the familiar manner. The appearance of the drawing is based upon that of the immediate reference from which it was processed, a less-than-perfectly faithful A4 colour print of the image as found on the ‘OSP’ website & enlarged beyond the limits of pictorial fidelity & crispness, itself a digital reproduction of a printed original, thus charting a passage through numerous levels of representation.

As ever, certain aspects of period style inspire a suitable sense of nostalgia, for the times & particular aspects of, such as Panini sticker albums & the collecting of stickers to populate that constituted a hobby of youth.
So inspired have I been of late, indeed, or so nostalgically-inclined, that I’ve had to invest in a fine pair of complete sticker albums, Panini’s ‘Euro Football’ of 1976-77 (which album I owned back in the day, courtesy of its free presentation with an issue of ‘Shoot’ magazine, & collected a substantial number of the stickers for, without, alas, ever coming close to completion) & FKS’s 'Wonderful World of Soccer Stars World Cup 1974’ stamp collection, which contains a great number of some of the most wonderful old photo portraits of footballers ever produced (in these times of air-brushed celebrity glamour, even amongst the football fraternity, the sheer almost unrelenting gnarliness of these men’s faces is a delight to behold). I’ve also succumbed to the irresistible lure of the boxed two-volume set of Panini’s ‘World Cup’ collection, a rather lovely reproduction of their sticker albums issued to cover the World Cups over the period from 1970 – 2010, again to be pored-over at leisure & for both pictorial & historical statistical research purposes (the anorakical nerdiness is a given), to feed if not necessarily satisfy the nostalgic impulse: this is the point where & at which, it seems, hauntology is transcended & ghosts become palpable things, objects, once more.