Less of a painting more of a making

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Listen to the song. A song about the process of painting.

The Factory of Roca Fannberg
The factory Roca Fannberg is not comparing itself to Andy Warhol´s factory, there are two similarites though. It is all about quantity, rather than quality and the process is much like colour by numbers.
Patience is an important factor. Time is not.
The important thing is to allow the paint to dry before you start painting the next layer and that is why it´s important to work on as many as possible. While on dries, you work on the next one. In that way I can do 10 in one afternoon.
Factory, not quality.

When I paint it is as simple as finding images with similar colours.
Once you have done that it is simply down to colouring by numbers. First a lighter tone and while that tone dries you do another picture and another and another.
Or as many watercolour blocks as I own. If I own 3 blocks I do 3 paintings at the same time, if I own seven then I do seven at the same time.



I am extremely meticulous when it comes down to painting torsos, packets and shirts (not suits). With my eyes pierced trying to get it right. If it goes wrong I can be in a foul mood for weeks (or until the next painting session).
But when it comes to the background there is no planning at all.
Just allowing the colours to play with each other, leaning the paper in one direction then another, while blowing a little bit. It is about the chance factor. Leaving random factors to decide.

Here are some watercolours from one session.
As I have not found titles for them yet, you are welcome to come with suggestions.

Now what?

Falling, watercolour on paper, 2009.

Barça have taken a slump around the same time as Davíð Oddsson is gone, finally the three most demands of the Icelandic people have gone through. Buy buy government, buy buy Davíð Oddsson and buy buy the heads of the financial regulations.
It is a strange situation, with the election looming and I fear that they have managed to make the public belief in the "leftish-monster" and the votes will go the same way as always to Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn (Independence party), but oh no, let´s be positive. The human nature is capable of learning. Or...
The spring is almost around the corner, we can now enjoy the snowy streets slightly longer as it starts to bright up around nine and is dark around seven. What a change from the cold long dark days of November and December. I will always remember them as kuldi kreppa og myrkur (cold, crisis and darkness).
It has not been an awful winter for me, I have been able to concentrate on what I need to concentrate on with moments of crisis of course, but moments of crisis is what makes one able to progress.

I would like to apply that to Barça. I refuse to belief in el cagometro, the shit metre, that Real Madrid are there to get us. That they will win the league in the end. I think the blimp is partly to do with concentration, of believing a job was done, but also with fatigue, more mental than physical. It is easier said than done, to have top mentality for two games a week, that fatigue is resulting in less pressure on the opposite team and a delay in decisions (passes, shots, tackles).

But spring is around the corner and my belief is intact. (I tell myself)

There is always hope to fall upon, watercolour on paper, 2009.

1983

Blood of a soldier, watercolour on paper, 2009.

Laugardalsvöllur, Reykjavík, Iceland 29/05/1983

A qualifier for the European Championship.

Scenery - The national stadium of Iceland
Participants - Spanish national team, Icelandic national team, little girl, some spanish exiles, a lot of curious Icelandic's, some mad football freaks and some nationalistic Spanish freaks, spanish father.

Props - Football ball, Icelandic flags, Barça flag, ice creams, lines men and a referee, seagull, TV.
The game started, it was an important one, giving the Icelandic team some hope for qualifying the first time for the European Championship, while Spain would have one foot in the finals taking place the next year.
The weather as expected was cold, wet and windy. It was a classic game between a small team and a bigger team, where one destroys and the other constructs. The fans were scattered throughout the stadium and ambience was high and noisy.
The little girl had a rucksack with some snacks and a Barça flag. The flag had been given to her by her father who was hoping to see his little girl on the television far away in Catalunya. The girl was fiddling with her flag waiting for the moment to take it up and making herself known to the outside world. It stayed in the bag for the whole of the first half, with the father scanning the supporters for a sign. One has to remember that this was well before the moment of immediate technology so one had to hope on promises being kept and not having to leave the room of the television at the magical moment. Spain scored the only goal and the moment seemed to be the moment. But the girl froze, hesitated for a moment, while looking at the other fans. Suddenly she noticed some Spanish fans next to her who talked so loudly and seemed so aggressive and plainly quite dangerous. Suddenly the memory of difficult relations between Catalans and Spaniards became vivid and even the little girl got scared that these Spaniards would not appreciate such an act of nationalism on foreign ground, so the flag stayed neatly in the rucksack as did the father looking into the distant television.


Structuring unreality, watercolour on paper, 2009.

Áfram Ísland

Patria, 2009.

Finally someone has taken the responsibility for the actions that put us in this shit.
The government has now ruptured, finally. I seriously hope that some measures will be taken, more than 100 days after the fall of the entire banking system. It is a strange feeling that the Independence party is not in power. I sincerely believe that nothing can be as bad as the former existing government. The left green party warned in 2005 against the danger of the over bloating finance system. Obviously no one listened.
I want Davíð Oddson away, the former prime minister and now the head of the central bank. The very man who sold off the banks. I also want to see frozen assets of the men (they were mainly men) who put the country into this mess. Remember that experts say that even if there would be no global crisis, Iceland would have gone bankrupt. It is not about that liquidity was suddenly scarce. It is about that they were wheeling and dealing illegally, with suspected corruption and a certain lawlessness.
I heard yesterday that the man who was one of the brains to Icesave is now head of the internal investigation of Landsbanki (one of the banks that the state took over). Yes the very same people who got the country in the mess are still in their jobs. The wealing and dealing men are still wealing and dealing.
I just hope to see a healthier Iceland, more aware and conscious about future generations.

Helvítis Fokking Fokk

She lost control.


The greatest phrase of the Icelandic kreppa (crisis) and it could refer to the Icelandic situation or the situation in Gaza, which I truly condemn.
Perhaps it is a bit indulgent, but I am referring to these paintings. That there is no success without failure. Or at least so do I hope. I tried so hard to make them work, perhaps I will make a last attempt. In the future. For now I just say Helvítis Fokking Fokk!!!


No success without failure


Trying too hard

From 2008 - 2009

The death of a former giant, 2009

2008 ended with the same thing as 2009 started, the smell of fireworks. I love the fireworks in Iceland, not the organised, methodic exhibition that occurs in other countries, but the chaotic, anarchic and individual fireworks of each household. Rocketing into the sky. One after another, you never know where to look or where to jump. It simply comes from each and one direction. This year it seem to be a much more subtle affair, only lasting for about 30 minutes, with the peak between midnight and fifteen minutes past midnight. Last year, it was meant to be less as there was a slight storm, but no. It was a total bombardment for about one hour. The noise was incredible, like the bird Kríur at an attack. My brother Magnús, said it sounded just like Palestina. I remember Jón Ásgeir shot up constantly with boxes full of them. I guess and hope that this year he was a bit quiter. Jón Ásgeir for those who might not know is one of the biggest villain of this crisis, a man that should be in jail, for continuously breaking the law in Iceland. Somehow he is not. People have seen him as a heroe, until now. He is the former owner of Glitnir (amongst others), and Baugur Group (the House of Fraser, Magasin du Nord etc). Enough of him. I just say he does not forget the sugar in the cookies (a classic comment in my home).


Frustration of a young man, 2009

On one of the first days of January, I experienced something I never had experienced before, and somehow kind of wanted to experience. The last ten minutes of a life. The hands reaching out, either grasping life or trying to enter the next level (although I am not sure I believe in that stuff). I will never forget the look in the eyes as death approached. The colour of the skin, the mouth, my own non sensations as I stopped to sense anything. Perhaps I am a pervert and I really would like to film someone I love dying, but it has to be someone who wants to go, who has had enough of life (as that moment might happen), enough of experiences and is just tired of life. Where death becomes a relief. I hope you meet your loved ones again, or that you are able to follow your loved ones in life. I sometimes think that I have angels following me (yes it sounds cheesy), but I am somehow quite lucky in many senses and I think I know who my angels are.


Rebirth, 2009

This year I am going to go to a fortune teller, there is a famous one, called Óli Draugur, Óli the ghost. I doubt I will talk about what happens there. I am scared, but also prepared. For 2009

I got new watercolour pans, lovely and I had to try them out, even if I should be doing something else. Here is the result. My favourite themes; sexy bodies and fragility.


Nipples, 2009

Barça, they continue with this conviction they left 2008 with.


Aiming high for the future, 2009


i am a mess, you are a mess, they are a mess, everyone is a mess, 2009
The only thing I am content with in this particular watercolour is its title.


Resurrection, 2009

El clásico

Evil against good



STOP (any method valid)



Make your mother proud




STOP


Two against one


Hopefully more will follow, I got some new colours, so exciting times ahead...

Last time

Last time Barcelona met Real Madrid I watched it, we all knew what would happen, but I decided to watch it and be in front of the television on time. On time to see one of the greatest humiliations in recent times (external humiliation, some would say fictitious humiliation). I wanted to watch el pasillo, when Barcelona were forced to clap their and my eternal enemy on to the pitch. To congratulate them on the title. The title we were never in the race for. Not only that hurt, but what came after was equally painful. I can´t remember the result, I can´t remember the game. I just know it was painful. In order to never ever forget. Almost like the most awful human causes and actions I decided to paint el pasillo. I never wanted to forget, I wanted that moment to be stamped in, rubbed in. It is something I simply do not want ever to live through. Again. (at least not for some time). Some moments have to be worked through, go through their psychoanalytical cycle to become something else.

I am not sure what will happen next week, worst case scenario 6 points ahead, best case scenario 12 points ahead. Real Madrid arrive wounded, hurt. It only remains to be seen if they have the strength to rise above or if they will sink further.

The dark cold long crisis winter

Together

These are notes, notes of thought, written without any depth. I probably contradict myself and upon better thought.
First of all Iceland - what did I wake up to? I think it is obviously mostly the politicians, the bankers and the so called control agency to blame. But honestly almost everyone I know has been living to an excess. "I have 20 jumpers, but none is yellow, so I bought one dark yellow and one mustardy yellow jumper". Including myself. We are living in times of a total consumption, even cultural consumption. Or perhaps we are just hamstering for worse times. I fear that all this will lead to a patriotism without any criticisms. It is not like Iceland is not a proud nation. It was interesting to be abroad as an Icelander in the middle of the storm. Suddenly it was not WOW, but ooooooohhhh. Not Björk anymore, but poor little pathetic nation. Fifty days after the crash no one has taken any decisions and it seems that nothing at all is done or will done. We will just sail into oblivion.
Ahead of us is the long dark cold crisis winter.
But I fear nothing.


Untitled heroes
What I do fear though is Nóra. I have found the best christmas present of them all. In a test glass you put shit (if you are totally fearless) or a piece of cloth is contaminated with this little virus. You can use it against the person you hate the most. Spread it all over them, touch them with it and they will fall down like a shot bird. Vomits and diarreah for a week. Marvellous weapon. Or you can use it as a tool to loose weight. Perhaps if you can get hold of them, you can use it against the prime minister, the "so called" head of the central bank or alike monsters.

A pleasure light at the back of the dark tunnel is Barcelona. We will have to wait what happens in December, when they meet Valencia, Sevilla and Real Madrid. There seems to be a togetherness that was there in the two marvellous years of Rijkaard. They grind their teeth and show a believe and a willing to win and to please that I feel proud of. I love my team to work for a beautiful victory. Patriotism aside, it does make me proud to have that many homegrown players. Valdés, Pique, Puyol, Busquets, Iniesta, Xavi, Bojan and Messi. Please make my winter.


United against the enemy

Excitement

Faceless, but not soulless

I have rarely been so excited lately, a perverse kind of excitement. The news. Iceland frantic cleaning up vomits. More on that later though, to keep something for the future. Hold the hands of your children and just wait.

Barcelona.
They seem to be scoring more goals than ever. I have missed them all, saw some over a broken line in Portugal, but they looked clinical, intuitive, forceful.
I have to say I am not too convinced of Guardiola, as a person. There is something in there that make me feel that he is a bit too arrogant, but so far the results and more than that is in his wind. I guess I am too sentimental and hurt that Rijkaard´s way did not work out. For me it was almost a blow to humanity. That one can´t just allow people and trust in people´s own dignity. The rise and fall of the ego. Impossible to control and when you try it is simply too late. He had to go, I agree that, but I can´t help but feel disappointed that it was a way that is incompatible with football at the highest level. To allow people to choose, the non-authoritative way.
I guess I was naive.

Rijkaard and his lonely shadow

Enjaulado (jailed)


Come to me


Don´t cry on my shoulder

For some reason I am not too obessessed with arranging my life according to the games of Barcelona, like I did more than a year ago. I feel that somehow they have to prove that it is worthwhile adjusting my schedule. I used to be obsessed, I used to arrange my dinner parties according to when Barcelona plays. But not know. Let´s hope for the good of ones health that it changes. To what it was like a couple of years ago.

Ps. The last watercolour (don´t cry on my shoulder) should have the MY pronounced loud. I was not that happy about those two at the time and I think you can see it in the effort and love I did not put into the picture.

Exhibition Barcelona - 18 Sep - 14 Nov

Poster Exhibition (made by Santiago)


Poetry



In total ecstasy (sexual)


Annoyed figure

FEVER PITCH - an article from frieze

The art of football

Juergen Teller filmed himself watching the 2002 World Cup final (Germany lost 2–0 to Brazil). Eyes on the television set, he twists and shouts, stewing with bullish rage. He later said that this film was ‘the most disturbing thing’ he’d ever seen.1

‘Zidane’s melancholy is my melancholy,’ explains the narrator of a story by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Watching the infamous 2006 World Cup final during which Zidane was sent off for headbutting Italian defender Marco Materazzi, he becomes absorbed by the player’s weariness, by ‘the intoxication of fatigue and nervous tension. I know it,’ he confesses, ‘I have nourished it and I feel it.’2

Harun Farocki’s 12-channel video projection Deep Play (2007) unpacks the visual archive of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) for the same match. Farocki’s spectators have to tear themselves away from his installation – even knowing the outcome, gallery-goers drop their masks of cool sophistication in their compulsion to watch this two-hour drama unfold again and again, from impossible angles and in overwhelming statistical detail.

Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) pushes that geometry to a new level by training 17 cameras on Zidane for the duration of a Real Madrid match. Isolated from the game by the camera’s focus, we wait with Zidane for the pass, for the attack. The soundtrack layers Scottish band Mogwai and crowd noise, the slap of foot against ball and the scratch of Zidane’s boot against the pitch. Over 90 minutes he smiles and laughs once in an exchange with a teammate. The singularity of this moment tells us he is at work. The film reveals nothing so well as Zidane’s expert control over his face.

Unlike that of 20-year-old football stars, lithe from running around and fond of diamond studs and long, flowing hair (Dimitar Berbatov or Lionel Messi), Zidane’s is a hard, menacing beauty. Gordon and Parreno’s film would have had an entirely different tone had they chosen an exuberant or openly flirtatious subject. Ronaldinho smiles every minute he is on the field, no matter how badly things are going. David Beckham’s audience is packed with fewer Marxist art critics (who prefer their subjects miserable) and with more women and gay men – as was the case for Sam Taylor-Wood’s video David (2004), a film of the footballer sleeping which functions as a homage to Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963).

Gordon and Parreno cite Andy Warhol’s films as an inspiration, but it is hard to see the connection: Zidane … is too beautiful, too controlled, too glossy. You can buy the DVD in supermarkets in France – a sign of how deeply the film co-operates with and expands Zidane’s celebrity. It has much more in common with Warhol’s portraits.

The real Warholian moment of football cinema is Hellmuth Costard’s film Fußball wie noch nie (Football as Never Before, 1971). A point of reference for Zidane… and due for a European DVD re-release this summer, the film takes the famously charming George Best as its subject and edits multiple camera views to produce a real-time portrait of the player singled out during the course of an entire match. Lest we miss the homoerotic subtext of football art (and football culture), the half-time interval features a cruisey bit of filmmaking as we follow Best through a narrow hallway and into what looks like the boot room. Best turns and faces the camera for nearly three minutes. He holds our gaze as long as he can, pursing his lips, looking away and then back in a seemingly overt homage to the Warholian screen test. Best strikes a deal here with the camera, inviting us to look at him when he takes the field again; shots of his socks, his shoulders and his crotch seem to go on for ever.

In her ongoing watercolour diary Yrsa Roca Fannberg sneaks onto Barcelona’s pitch. These small, moody paintings are close cousins to Costard’s film and an important counterpoint to work such as Deep Play and Zidane… Costard and Fannberg give the lie to the game’s open secret. Football is a deeply sentimental space of male intimacy. Players explode in ecstasy, but they also love each other in more ordinary ways. They collapse in frustration, they cry. They are lost and wounded. They wrap their arms around each other and talk.

Eduardo Galeano (the Roland Barthes of football writing) describes ‘the history of soccer’ as ‘a sad voyage from beauty to duty’. That ‘duty’ is paid to the sports ‘telecracy’, in which ‘functionaries specialize in avoiding defeat’.3 Artists respond to this aspect of the game with melancholy and nostalgia – and often both. In ‘big’ art such as Farocki’s installation and Gordon and Parreno’s film, both of which were made in collaboration with that telecracy, the game itself is a receding horizon of pure experience in which the player dissolves with a pivot and a swing of the foot. His body – how it feels to be him – is beyond the reach of any representation. Technology and telecracy unite in the erasure of the player’s body, and his pleasure, from the picture. Roca Fannberg counters that theft by choosing as her medium a very simple dissolve of water on paper to capture how our moods, our thoughts, our legs get entangled with theirs. If the player dissolves, it is with us, and in tears.

The game is excised from the less romantic experimental film Substitute (2006) but not out of any formal trick. Fred Poulet gave his friend Vikash Dhorasoo a Super-8 camera so that the latter might keep a cinematic diary of his summer performances for the French national team during their 2006 World Cup run. The project was a disaster. Dhorasoo’s teammates refused to be filmed. Some, such as Zidane and Thierry Henry, are global brands; their images are trademarked. In spite of having featured in qualifying matches, Dhorasoo scarcely left the bench – many think the film project was to blame. Filming training is off limits, and the telecracy owns the game. The camera isolated Dhorasoo; we hardly ever leave his hotel room. His footage is grainy, often out of focus, while the narrative is sparse and grim. We track Dhorasoo’s struggle to keep his alienation and bitterness in check. Poulet and Dhorasoo replace the macho heroics of wounded masculinity with a far more compelling truth of exile, desire and resentment. The film ends not with a defiant geste but with Dhorasoo climbing the stairs to his apartment and sitting down at a table to open a large stack of mail.

1 Cited by Liz Hoggard in ‘This is for You, Dad’, The Observer, Sunday 14 September 2003
2 Jean-Philippe Toussaint, ‘Zidane’s Melancholy’, in New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, 62, 2007, pp. 12–14
3 Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, Verso, London, 1998

Jennifer Doyle

Jennifer Doyle is the author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (2006) and blogs about football at From a Left Wing.

Crisp Summer Night

Pasillo
Generally I am not a masochist, but I decided to do this painting as some kind of therapy. I really do hope I never ever have to experience this again and the player should use it as their screensaver in order to remind themselves again and again this must never ever happen again.



Structuring Unreality
Two of my favourite players. Not playing for the same team. Don´t ask me about the title, I was short of imagination.

Some watercolour paintings

Rijkaard and his lonely shadow



In different directions


The red training shirt of Barça is good news, a bright, beautiful colour to paint, although I am not sure of the brownish shorts. Time will tell.
I will miss painting Rijkaard as it is really good fun, painting his hair and his firm packet. Guardiola, might have a smaller packet although he does seem to wear tight trousers, his hair - boring, at least to paint.
The only reason I would want to sign Adebayor or Drogba are painterly reasons, so paintoresque, those expressions, these haircuts, always with their shirt off.

By by the back door, through the middle door.

I would like to do or read some statistics on which doors, super stars (Kaká, Henry, Schevchenko, Zidane, Ronaldo, C.Ronaldo, Figo, Eto'o, Ronaldinho) leave. Not from a small/middle club, but how they leave the big clubs.
It is said that stars never leave by the big door, which is not that strange, as clubs won't sell them while they are of use (if there is not someone with a huge cheque book) and if they stay they become a burden of the bench. A good manager should always sell them the year they start to entering their decline, however the fans hardly understand when that moment is, which leaves them discontent.
Ronaldinho and Deco should have been sold last year and this (however much hurts) is the year Eto'o should be sold. Ronaldinho, should have been sold two years ago. It was the idea of the club that a player like him deserves to leave by the front door it became an unsustainable situation on everyone's behalf. The player is mainly to blame, but each part has a percentage in the whole soap opera it has become.

How did Zidane leave, by the middle door. Figo, Ronaldo (back door), time though puts everything in perspective.



Images:
Playing not playing
In motion (tribute to New Order and Eto'o)

Welcome

Keita, another addition to the midfield. I hope it will give a different dimension to a midfield that sometimes has lacked physical power and height. Any big team need variations and the sense of being able to surprise and change the course of the game.
Barcelona have so many times this year been overrun, it is a free highway straight to the defence. Hopefully Keita will stop that.
Touré, Keita and Iniesta is what I want to see.
Image:
In Trust

I don't see it all as fair play!

It hurts to read the news papers today. I am not fully sure of the intentions behind Laporta and his board. he claims it was a united decisions, but it all seems like some kind of dirty play. What is Txiki doing? How come he is intact in this situation, does he only work two months of the year? How come he has not been sacked. I do think his signings were excellent last year, at least three out of the four and the fourth was with good intentions, but...
I think every one is guilty and I suspect this summer will be very lively and not in a positive sense.

Relief

It was never really a fully realistic task, or perhaps it was. To reach Moscow. It would have been a wonderful way to end something, or perhaps that end would have been prolonged. With the second year and no titles, the drama is present, very present. A third year without titles is unconceivable and I don't believe the club will take any risks for next year. Don't forget elections are looming under the horizont and if it is bad enough to have had two years without a single titles (not even the Catalan Cup, I think) you can imagine what three years would be.
Next year, is now, even if we have to fight for the second place.
Not fight, but obtain it.
The so called "worst Madrid ever" have won the same amount of league titles as the so called "best Barça ever".


Nothing more needs to be said.

The Manchester game was a pain, not a pain in the arse, but a painful painful week. The hope was there once we reached an allrightish result at Camp Nou. Perhaps perhaps, we could reach Moscow (a city I always wanted to visit and still do want to visit). A blurry, foggy dream. Was present, was there. Where there is life, there is hope. Yes.
With the 180 minutes without being able to score a single goal, with the so called "best three strikers in the world), it ended. I have to say that I did not feel sad, angry, just relieved that this was over. Clinging on to an Utopia, looking at the sky and hoping there was some help to be had, looking at the stones asking the elves to be there, to send their protection army.
Illusions can be helpful, but never useful.