Monday, June 02, 2014

World Cup '74 Portrait #72 (Ilija Petkovic: Yugoslavia)




graphite & putty eraser, with watercolour pencil/30x21cm

This most recent addition to the gallery features the palely loitering Ilija Petkovic, who appeared in both the FKS & Panini ‘World Cup 1974’ collectors’ albums, & was selected for inclusion in the Yugoslavia squad for the tournament, where he played in the first five of his country’s matches (although merely as an 84th minute substitute against West Germany in the opening second phase fixture), scoring once in the 9 – 0 rout of Zaire, only missing the final inconsequential defeat to Sweden (interestingly, the only one of those four named states to still exist as such).

Choosing the sticker from the FKS album from which to make an enlarged photocopy to serve as the immediate visual reference for the drawing process resulted in a most ghostly image, highly suitable for another of the many players who made no inroads into my consciousness at the time of my experience of the television coverage of the ’74 World Cup &, indeed, remained unheard-of until coming into relatively recent possession of the sticker albums that both preview & commemorate the event: given such a source, the drawing  consequently condemns the portrait subject to remain in a state of some obscurity.

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