In the beginning there was Pete

Here is the first of twelve etchings that I've been working on over the last four months. It's of Pete Doherty, based on a photo I took backstage moments before Babyshambles played a gig in Birmingham at the National Indoor Arena. 'You pick your moments, don't you,' were the words that had just left his lips when the shutter opened.

I've etched him into copper, before inking him up and printing him onto some 19th century hand-made laid paper.

But why? - why bother going to all that trouble instead of just using a photo? Because I wanted to imitate/emulate Sydney Parkinson, one of the principle artists to accompany Captain Cook on his voyage to the south seas in the late 18th century. This moment in history was also when the word 'eccentric' first appeared in the English literary and cultural landscape. In writing In Search of... I've tried to use a late 18th century understanding of the word and apply it to a 21st century setting. So with this etching, similarly, a late 18th century lens is used to present a contemporary icon. Also I wanted to emulate this man's work because of the way he depicted his subjects. Most were Pacific islanders, men or women who had never seen white Western Europeans before, avatars of the unknown for an English public who would later see the prints, so for Parkinson there'd have been a temptation to show them as exotically wierd, alien, unusual, Other. He doesn't. See below. Instead he renders them familiar. There's something entirely unthreatening about the expression of this guy- 'a Chief of New Zealand, the face curiously tatowd, or mark'd, according to their manner'. I guess in an identical sense, having met them, I didn't want to portray the people I had interviewed as odd or in some way alien, and I think there's a temptation of sorts to do this when writing a book about English eccentrics.