Kelly Robbins interviews painter Wendy White about the work in her show Madrid Me Mata at Arts + Leisure Gallery, New York, on view through September 1, 2014

White comments: "Sports in general has been a theme in my work for several years. Sports gear, the symbols of speed, the static logo, Adidas’s three stripes – symbols of speed that have been popularised by sports gear. I think my particular interest in soccer grew out of the headspace of sports in general and how it’s akin to the headspace of an artist: the singular discipline, going into your studio and plugging away at something that’s very difficult to describe, that moment of success or failure. Soccer, in particular, is fascinating because it’s aligned with national style. If you watched the World Cup, you could see how every country’s team has a specific style that comes out of that country’s history – their war history, their body language, their linguistics – and it all builds into this style of play on the field, and that correlation with gesture and the idea of a mark that symbolises movement or a style of painting became really fascinating to me. I’ve been working with soccer images as a way of exploring that connection."