With The Silent Patient, we showed my early designs that featured a series of torn watercolor papers to Alex, the author. How did input from the book’s author inform the cover’s aesthetic?
The Greek tragedy Alcestis is an underlying theme of the book.ģ.
I initially envisioned torn paper revealing the word “Silent.” I ripped some watercolor paper in a way that unfurled to reveal first the word “Silent” and then a bust of a Greek goddess’s mouth much like Alcestis’s. What was your initial vision for the cover of The Silent Patient ? Eventually, the idea for a painting of a woman with some damage to it kept resurfacing for me.Ģ. I kept thinking, however, I still wanted to allude to painting, perhaps through some other means. I could have tried to replicate the paintings as described in the book but felt that there needed to be some room for the reader’s imagination through the author’s words. I found myself drawn to continue exploring painting as a theme for the design. In The Silent Patient, the protagonist is a painter. As such, the production used a special stock that resembled canvas and a high gloss lamination was used over the painted type to attain a linseed oil quality. The protagonist is an up-and-coming art dealer and the story is an observation of the art world in the late 1990s. I dealt with something similar once before, when I designed a cover for Steve Martin’s novel, An Object of Beauty. Was it a new challenge to design a cover for The Silent Patient, given one of the main characters is an artist?