Painter, multimedia artist & designer based in Zurich, Switzerland, David Diehl is interested in many kinds of art and is also practising different techniques: painting, collage, digital collage, installation. Thematically he worked several times with the aspect of adoration, worship, etc. which is a main part in the fussballikone project He has been studying at the Zurich University of Arts ZHDK from the end of the to 2004.
Some time ago he had been looking at some old books from the seventies, reporting the year in Italian football, a lot of portraits of players, teams and so on. He recognized that a lot of them do have an expression, a look in their eyes, a posture like the holies in old paintings. So he began to work with those pictures and sometime later he painted his childhood heroes — Swiss club FC Aarau’s Rolf Osterwalder and Charly Herberth in the style of traditional icons.
Each illustration takes about three months to finish, it is made with oil and the color takes an extensive amount of time to dry. Aura is in gold leaf.