- Shamser Khalid
Footballers And Their Recreation Into Art
Many people get inspired by football players, and among them are artists. Over the years, different artists have created a variety of artistic renditions of several players. Some artists have created works to commemorate certain footballers' achievements, while others have made reimaginings of them.
Recent Works
A recent art recreation of football players was done by an artist named Michael Browne. It was for an art exhibition titled, “From Moss Side to Marseille: The Art of Michael Browne and Eric Cantona,” and launched in January. The art exhibition was launched by football legend Eric Cantona and aimed to showcase sporting heroes and their impact on society.
According to an interview with the former player, Cantona had hoped the display would encourage interest among children.
In the exhibition, some paintings showed recognizable figures as larger-than-life protagonists in scenes lifted from history and mythology. These figures included soccer icon Diego Maradona, boxer Muhammad Ali and Olympic athlete Jesse Owens.
Before this exhibition was a set of artworks shared on social media by an artist identified as Paul Parsons. Due to the recent rise of art created by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Parsons decided to join in on the trend. Using an AI program, Parsons reimagined ten popular footballers as children and recreated them into toddlers.
The reimagined footballers included Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe, Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, Harry Kane, Gareth Bale, Kevin De Bruyne, Mohamed Salah, Antoine Griezmann, and Robert Lewandowski.
The artist shared the pictures on his Instagram account and captioned them as ''Young Football Players. Who's your favourite?''
Plenty of fans were delighted with the post and left many positive comments. One fan had commented, ''Omgahh how precious is baby Mbappe!!'' and another wrote, ''Baby Neymar is too cute. Brilliant work.''
Different Reimaginings
Another set of artworks featuring recreated footballers are paintings made by renowned British artist and forger John Myatt.
The paintings were made in conjunction with the launching of the new Sky Sports 5 channel and featured famous portraits with the heads of footballers. These pieces included Andrea Pirlo as Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" and Cristiano Ronaldo as Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro's "Portrait of a Professor Antero de Quental."
Aside from toddlers and famous artworks, some players have also been reimagined as military generals thanks to Italian artist Pupazzaro.
Pupazzaro, otherwise known as Fabrizio Birimbelli, is an artist that started painting as a hobby before his work gained attention and followers started asking him for portraits of their idols all over the world.
When asked why he had recreated certain football players in military gear he said, "The choice of these generals is because it gives an epic, but also ironic, view of the football 'heroes'.”
"They are not really heroes, of course, but as a football fan, during the 90 minutes they look like that in your eyes."
Some of the players that the Italian artist painted as military people were Olivier Giroud and France goalkeeper Hugo Lloris. Fabrizio even revealed that he was invited to Roma's training ground to give a painting to Italy legend Francesco Totti.
Many artists have recreated football players in various styles, but these are just a few who managed to reach headlines.
