Per's Tifo - finished

My friend Per is a true heart-and-soul MFF supporter. MFF is a soccer club in Southern Sweden and stands for Malmö Fotboll Förening. I had an idea to create a painting for his fortieth birthday and wanted to take the starting point as the club's logo:

In this case I didn't want to do a straight up-and-down copy of the logo but instead crop really close in to a part of it. After lots of experiments I decided on this composition:

Which I really like. Originally my intention was to have the MFF logo small, on the bottom right, but when I'd got this far, the simpleness made a positive impression on me, so I kept it off. There was also a risk that it would look like a piece of merchandise. Another positive aspect of leaving the logo off is that it becomes more abstract, and with that a bit of a 'secret club'. MFF supporters will recognise it instantly and appreciate the 'bigger picture' which exists outside the canvas.

The paint is put on really thickly to give the piece another dimension and I suppose quite simply to reinforce that it's actually a painting, rather than a print. The lighting in the room will give interesting shadows and perhaps even at a stretch of the imagination some goals scored.

The painted blue areas wrap around the whole canvas, as if this was part of a huge flag waved during a game.