Perfume

The focus on the first chapter, and the one thing which stuck with me from the first part of the book was the way the author describes Paris in the 1800's particularly the emphasis on scale and just how bad the city smelt. I wanted to try and recapture the complicated and overpowering collection of odours by creating an image that was similarly visually busy. I started by looking at photographs of Paris from the mid to late 1800s as much of the architecture would have looked the same around the time the novel was set (particularly around the Ile De La Cite). I had also been to the Museum of Everything as part of our London study trip and was intrigued by the drawings of Leonhard Fink particularly because of their child like quality, and visual similarity with art brut/ savant artists etc. I liked the idea of attempting to approach the images from the perspective of the books protagonist (He is outside of ordinary society in a similar way a schizophrenic might be and naive drawing as a visual approach could work well).

I chose to try and keep printmaking central to this project for two reasons; firstly because a lot of the book illustration from the time the novel is set would have been wood engraving (very similar aesthetically to lino) and also because it is a skill which, as i have stated before, I would like to develop.