First thoughts on "In Europa": Oscar Wilde

The first trick was definitely get a digital copy of the book as it's a real war and peace and I thought using the ctrl + f word search function would be a lot quicker than reading through the whole bloody thing.  I found a few interesting references, one of which kept me busy for the first few weeks of the project.  It was:

" In London, in 1895, there was the conviction of the brilliant writer Oscar Wilde for perversity." 

After having fround this it was suggested to me to read "De Profundis" which means From the Depths.  It is a very enlightening and interesting piece which delves into Oscar Wilde's view of life.  It was immediately inspiring with quotes such as "Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. " 

I continued by reading different short works by Oscar Wilde as I had only read "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and found them to be equally inspiring.  I think this was mainly because you could really see so much of his own story in what he wrote and did in such a beautiful and poetic way.   

At the early stages of this project we also made an  academy trip to Paris.  Oscar Wilde lived at Paris and I was able to see his tomb at the graveyard Père Lachaise.  I did not find the tomb very beautiful at all, people had scrawled all over it and a next door tomb stone had been broken by people standing on it to kiss the statue.  It was quite an emotional visit for me.

 

Although I put a lot of thought into the theme the main problem with this project was that I really wanted to do a CD cover and merchandising. 

I looked into doing a DVD cover and merchandising for the film "Dorian Gray" but personally felt that film merchandising was more limited for an illustrator than music merchandising.  

I thought I could take the piece "De Profundis" and make a CD Cover out of this but there was very little reasoning other than a personally recognition of the lyrical and melodic qualities of the text.  I tried to connect the atmosohere of the text to a music genre and the closest I could get was Doom Metal but it's so very hard to categorise something in a musical genre if there isn't any music there to analyse.  

This was why I conclusively picked a different subject from the text which I will get back to in a few posts time.  I do hope to work on a project based around "De Profundis" in the future.