coloured pencil & putty eraser/30x20cm
Halfway through the third drawing of the new ‘project’, perhaps due to this being scattered frustratingly across unsatisfactorily short sessions & days, the critical thought occurred that to continue in such style would itself be unsatisfactory & that something thus needed to be done, to change.
That something was influenced, it must be credited, by Mr Ian Hodgson’s work concerning the Moon Wiring Club, during a ‘whimsical’ visit to the Blank Workshop & the ‘Discography’ section of the website in particular, opening as it does with an image of the cover art for the debut single ‘I’m More Than a Memory Now’, featuring in crudely pixelated form what is still recognizably a portrait of a female face, as might be appreciated:
By way of coincidence, one of the visual (re)sources being used for the basis of the drawings, for plotting form & features, has been A4 prints of digital versions of the original FKS & Panini album stickers/stamps, the images pixelating as they are enlarged to such scale.
The ‘memory’ in the title is highly significant too, as it relates to the nascent project, in that the 1974 World Cup tournament constitutes my earliest memories of (taking an interest in) football, as mentioned, that, however vividly ‘hauntological’ the sticker albums that form the initial, essential level of source material may be, are inevitably subject to & filtered through many layers of loss, over the course of the 38 years that have lapsed since the completion took place, was ‘live’ & ‘now’, & the pixelated image represents such haziness & ‘interference’ perfectly: certain names might remain, as do recollections of watching particular matches – the Final, West Germany versus Sweden on a Sunday evening before school again on the Monday, the latter part of the hosts, again, v Poland upon returning home from school one afternoon, Holland v Brazil – but much has inevitably passed into generality.
Thus the appearance of this drawing is informed primarily by that of its direct source, the A4 colour print taken of a digital image of the original stamp, in its album, enlarged substantially from such source & therefore pixelating rather significantly in the process.
The pixel being a modular unit, of course, implies the arrangement of multiples in the form of a grid, our old modernist-minimalist friend of yore, & this is indeed the case with the source: the drawing, less rigorously, is influenced by this rather than slavishly imitating, at least in this reworked instance, & thus takes the form of a network of horizontal, vertical & ‘square’ marks that acknowledge the source, as does the range of colours used, where a distinct yellowing/pinking into individual unmixed modules occurs in the transition from smooth printed original to pixelated image.
This process being the formal subject of the drawing, the portrait subject then comes to resemble, again but in a different style, the first member of the Argentina squad to be represented, alphabetically, in the FKS album, Norberto Alonso.
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