A bit about Tim
Briefly then: Graduated Central School of Art and Design in London 1980. Created a set of four posters for The National Portrait Gallery. Cut teeth with a trade publisher originating new magazines. Spent a number of very happy years working with Decca, Virgin, and EMI Classics packaging and promoting classical music. Art direction for Ute Lemper’s first UK release ‘Ute Lemper sings Kurt Weill’. Decca’s Ashkenazy catalogue was exhibited in ‘The Art of Selling Songs’ at the V&A. Designs and illustrations for fiction and non-fiction book jackets for major publishing houses around the world. Punchy magazine covers by the ship load for ‘New Scientist’ and ‘The Gulf’ to name but two ...
So, in 1987 he decided to say goodbye to all that and to go travelling to find out more about this big wide world he was living in ... there was lots of it. Singapore was obnoxious, Malaysia fleeting, Thailand easy, and China, well China was just damned hard work. Transport was still relatively primitive and arduously slow, accommodation outside the major cities could only be described as basic but Gravestock, equipped with his sketchbook and his vintage Rolleicord Vb, soldiered on.
The hardships of China were not enough to put him off. Two years later he was back and heading down the silk road along the northern rim of the Taklimakan desert bound for Kashgar, China’s remotest city, and the wanderlust didn’t stop there. Subsequent travels took him the breadth of Rajasthan, by camel across the Thar desert, the length of India from Delhi to Welligama in Sri Lanka, through Turkey from Istanbul to Dogubeyazıt (the last town before Iran), and twice to Japan ... then he had kids.
The grand upshot of all this restless globe-trotting is the extensive photographic archive which has slowly but surely been digitised to a high quality. The desert images have been particularly useful in covers for ‘The Gulf’ magazine (and in a New Scientist editorial), and he periodically receives requests for images of the Eiffel tower or Sri Lankan stilt fishermen or the Tang dynasty pagodas near Dali ...
The Eiffel tower.
