The Periodic Table

This was a really nice commission that I received from the Folio Society in the early part of last year. After sending some samples out to Sheri at Folio I was contacted to work on an initial test image for the book The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. I met with the designer for a short briefing, had a quick nose around the Folio building and library (so many amazing books and illustrations), then got started on the illustration.

For anyone not familiar with the book it's something of an autobiography with each chapter relating chemical elements to periods in Levi's life. For the test image I worked on the Cerium chapter which documents his experience as a prisoner of war in Auschwitz. I think Gavin, the designer, wanted to see how I'd tackle this subject matter before I got the go-ahead for the rest of the book. To cut a long story short(er) it went well and I was asked to produce seven more images plus the binder.


Sheri requested that I include some kind of reference to chemical symbols in each illustration but while I was doing some research I stumbled across a review noting that the book calls attention to the "inter-connectivity of life" which I thought would be great to also reflect in the images (somehow). It seemed to make sense to have the images relate to each other in some way so I decided to link certain compositional elements or details so that when the images are viewed side by side the connections become more apparent.

It was interesting creating the images within this parameter, one image would feed the next whilst also being informed by the previous so it was a bit of a juggling act at times but hopefully it goes some way towards mirroring the intentions behind the text. The fact that the visual connections will never be obvious to the reader also seemed to add a poetic nature to the concept, but it might also be possible that I just like making life hard for myself. One other reference that might not be immediately obvious is in the binder image. The olive coloured dots represent the chapters that Levi chose to write about, each chapter given the title of a chemical element, the dots are where they would appear on the periodic table itself.

I had originally intended to take a lot of photo's of the process but I think I got carried away and forgot about it, apart from the one below. There was a lot of work yet to be done from this point but this was the kind of thing I was doing, working on all of the pages together as if it was one big picture, then pulling out individual pages to work up the details.

The images can be seen larger on my website and the book can be bought from the Folio Society here