Today the opposite of tomato is 'the jagged metal bad-life'
coloured pencil & putty eraser/30x20cm
Presenting today what is intended, ambitiously, to be but the first of a series of drawings processed from a combination of closely-related source material, being the sticker/stamp collections contained within two albums issued to celebrate the then-upcoming 1974 football World Cup, FKS’s ‘Wonderful World of Soccer Stars World Cup 1974’ in all its original glory & the reproduction of Panini’s ‘Munchen 1974’, as have previously featured, relatively recently, & been duly enthused about as iconic examples & objects of nostalgic delight.
To reiterate, the portraits of then-contemporary footballers depicted upon these (sets of) stickers are imbued with a ‘hauntological’ quality that exerts an irresistible attraction – essentially the 1974 World Cup, with all its international glamour & intriguing names, was the point at which I belatedly, at least compared to school peers, developed an interest in & passion for football - hence their suitability, their insistence, in providing the visual matter from which to proceed with the planned drawing project.
The format the drawings, individually & as a series(-to-be), (will) take, is based upon a combination of the source stickers & album designs, primarily utilizing the portraits in the FKS album, replacing these with their Panini counterparts or alternatives when & where the latter might prove more appropriate to purposes.
The FKS album features regular squads of 16 players for each of the 16 competing nations (plus the inclusion of a 17th country, Spain, who had yet to settle the outcome of their play-off with subsequently-victorious Yugoslavia at the time the album went to press, evidently some time before the Finals took place), whereas the Panini album adopted a more ‘hierarchical’ approach, featuring 20 players to represent the powerhouses of West Germany (the hosts & subsequently winners), Brazil (the reigning champions) & Italy, 14 for 10 other countries & but 6 for the newcomer-‘minnows’ Australia, Haiti & Zaire: the ‘project’ as envisaged will follow the FKS pattern of 16 x 16 portrait drawings, but then might possibly expand to take in a further selection based on the Panini album’s inclusion of ‘excluded teams’ (i.e nations who failed to qualify for the tournament, such as Spain, & on this occasion England).
The first subject therefore, alphabetically the first player representing the first featured nation, is Norberto Alonso of Argentina who actually, it transpired, failed to make his country’s World Cup squad as subsequently chosen: an interesting side issue of the project is to compare the players depicted by the albums’ publishers with the official list of the 1974 squad, to note the omissions & replacements – one notes that such Argentinians as Carlos Babington & Rene Houseman, whose surnames seem to imply something of an English heritage & became fixed in the memory, are absent from the albums’ squads yet went on to appear at the tournament.
Nonetheless, the project will endeavour to represent the portraits as featured on the stamps & stickers, irrespective of whether the subjects were included in the actual playing squads, as finalized, for the competition.
Technically, as coloured pencil has become the most oft-used drawing medium over recent months, & given the nature of the coloured reproductions upon the source albums’ stamps/stickers, the process will be carried out using such means, which somehow seems appropriate for a project so rooted in childhood memory, being tools associated with drawing during such times. The immediate visual source for the drawings is a photocopy of the image from the album, enlarged by about 50%, with recourse also to the actual stamps/stickers themselves – these reproductions of reproductions inevitably experience some degree of colour difference in the process, & the ‘re-mediated’ drawings’ appearance is obviously informed by this.
Soundtrack:
Moon Wiring Club ‘Clutch it Like a Gonk’ & ‘A Spare Tabby at the Cat’s Wedding’
PiL ‘Metal Box’
A PiL sandwich, with the autumnal sounds of the Moon Wiring Club either side: mmm...most nourishing & satisfying.
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