Artist
Statement: Degree Show Paintings
“There's
nothing romantic about football.”
Each of these
paintings takes an embrace as its subject.
Appropriated from mid 1990’s issues of
‘Scottish Football Magazine’ and ‘Shoot’, these are
images of professional sportsmen, the very
embodiment of heroic masculinity, embracing in
celebration and defeat.
I am interested in
things I am not meant to see or understand. The
subject of these paintings is love between
heterosexual men; the fierce affection and
masculine sympathy that my source photos of
football hugs bear witness to. This experience is
entirely inaccessible to me and therefore deeply
mysterious.
I observe the earnestness of ‘Scottish Football
Magazine’ as an outsider. Its atmosphere of death
or glory, juxtaposed with pathos and the
tragicomedy of effort and failure appeals to my
sense of the ridiculous. There is endless potential
for satirical humour in the heroic masculine
gesture and the elaborate ritual of football, yet
my depictions of these macho embraces are as
celebratory as they are subversive.
I am interested in
folk art and icon painting, forms that, despite
their lack of sophistication, exercise a
fascination through the sheer force of feeling with
which they were made. My football players are
decorated with chivalric and military orders, they
wear paper crowns and halos appropriated from
religious painting. Intricate patterns wrap around
their bodies and circle their faces and they are
all hung about with the crown jewels of
Europe. These paintings
aim to celebrate the heroism of earnestness and
effort, to elevate these gestures of understanding
and love between men to the level of a
quasi-religious mystery.
Someone once told
me “Football is ugly. There is nothing
romantic about football.” It was a stimulating
comment. I made these paintings to show why I
disagree.