1000 DRAWINGS BY TIM BAYNES
Writer Alan Jackson reports
Some of us keep a diary. Others record their impressions of new people and places in the words of emails, letters or postcards sent to those back home. But for 20 years now Bespoke Framing artist Tim Baynes has chosen to record his impressions of the wider world in a series of sketch books (Moleskine ones, the brand famously used by painters and writers ranging from Van Gogh to Picasso, Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin).
To date he has filled some 30 of these elegant but capacious A5 volumes with the visual details of his itinerant passage around the globe, both as an independent traveller and as a senior executive in the advertising industry, latterly with Microsoft and the BBC. And a thousands annotated drawings within all speak with Baynes’s distinctive artistic voice.
“Which is energetic and impatient,” he laughs in self-assessment. “It can be the case that, while knowing I may never return to whichever place I’m visiting, I’ll only have a window of 10 minutes to myself in the one day I’m there. But that’s still time enough to soak up a little culture and get down on paper what I see and my feelings about it.
It’s about capturing moments that would otherwise be lost.” The result often grows into a personal mini-guide to whichever town or city he’s in, with drawings and companion text later posted by Baynes on his blog http://timbaynesart.blogspot.co.uk
Now a selection of his favourite drawings are published in DRAWING ON EXPERIENCE a copy of which is available from Tim’s website www.timbaynesart.co.uk
