World Cup '74 Portrait #53 (Roque Avallay: Argentina)

graphite & putty eraser, with watercolour pencil/30x21cm

Continuing with the project of drawings based upon the original source material of stickers from the FKS ‘Wonderful World of Soccer Stars World Cup 1974’ & Panini ’München 74’ album collections, today’s randomly-chosen portrait subject is Roque Avallay, who featured as a contender in both of the albums but was not subsequently chosen for the official Argentina squad for the tournament, to which he thus enjoys a suitably ‘ghostly’ relationship, &, until coming into possession of the sticker albums, had remained unsurprisingly unknown to me even allowing for my relatively few recollections of what was the first (televised) football in which I took an interest but which has of course proved a seminal event.

For further drawings of Roque Avallay, as featured earlier in previous false-start incarnations of the World Cup '74 portrait project, please see here, here & here.

Having a Re-think/Re-draw Again #2: World Cup '74 #2 v3

graphite & putty eraser/30x20cm

Here is the third version of the second drawing of the World Cup 1974 football stickers project, representing an enlarged print of a digital scan (subsequently reduced in its dimensions) of the original ‘stamp’ image-object as featured as a component part of the FKS ‘Wonderful World of Soccer Stars World Cup 1974’ album collection.
In heavily-pixellated, de-photographized, re-mediated form, the portrait subject buried within the drawing process is again Argentina’s Roque Avallay, no longer necessarily recognizable as such as his features are broken down into toned cells within the overall grid structure but nonetheless distinct from number one in the series, his compatriot Norberto Alonso.

Again, the usual modernist-minimalist & ‘hauntological’ conditions apply.

At the current rate of drawing progress, the estimate is that the project as proposed will take a good 10 years to complete, which, whilst daunting, is also quite a comforting prospect, somehow…

Having a Re-think/Re-draw #2: World Cup '74 #2 v2

coloured pencil & putty eraser/30x20cm

With reference to the previous post, this is the second of the World Cup '74 football stamps/stickers collection-sourced images to be re-drawn, with immediate recourse to an A4 colour print of a digital representation of the original stamp, its image consequently enlarged to the point of significant pixelation, which appearance informs that of the drawing.

Soundtrack:

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds 'Abattoir Blues' & 'The Lyre of Orpheus'
Sol Seppy 'The Bells of 1 2'
Moon Wiring Club 'Striped Paint for the Last Post'

World Cup '74 #2 (Roque Avallay)

coloured pencil & putty eraser/30x20cm

Surprisingly hot on the heels of the previous drawing (although keeping up a rate of production that should be necessary for the proposed ‘Project’ to take any such form) comes a second processed from the visual source material of a combination of an original stamp from the FKS-published collectors’ album ‘Wonderful World of Soccer Stars World Cup 1974’ & an enlarged, A4 photocopy of, this time featuring the second member of the imagined Argentinian squad, alphabetically arranged, one Roque Avallay, who, in common with the initial/preceding player, was subsequently not actually chosen to represent his country at the tournament.
This being the case, & personal memories of the first real football action in which I took an interest being rather hazy in most of the particularities, although a few of the ‘exotic’ names have stuck, the ‘hauntological’ aspect of such a drawing relates to the generality of the 1974 World Cup rather than anything other pertaining to the portrait subject himself (of whom I’ve never previously even heard), but nonetheless the source material is most evocative & is imbued with its own especial vividness, even at almost 40 years’ distance.