Somewhere in January 99, I received an email from Tim Thomson who created that Vision Tarot Deck. I had been very impressed with the style of his cards asked if he would mind being interviewed. He kindly agreed and the contents of the email interview are posted here. I must apologize to Mr Thomson for posting the interview so late as I was suffering various hard ware problems with my computer.

I was born in England in a rather grotty little town in the north which was about a million miles from anything as esoteric as tarot. As soon as I had the opportunity, I left and moved to Scotland.

My interest in the Tarot came largely from a friend of mine who had a deck and did a reading for me one day. The reading was remarkably accurate and I guess the whole thing intrigued me, especially since I have a scientific background. It seemed like one of those impossible but fascinating things, and I was keen to study it further. From there on in I became absorbed in the symbolism of Tarot and the outlook it gave on the medieval interpretation of things.

The Vision Tarot was actually created more or less by accident. I have been a photographic, and more recently digital, artist for many years. One of my regular models had very long blonde hair and she reminded me of one of the illustrations from a reproduction Medieval Tarot that I owned. So I decided to create the Star card as just a single artistic piece. Quite some time later, I was approached by a record company to do a cover illustration for a CD which had the moon as its theme. The idea occurred to me to do another Tarot card, the Moon this time. As things turned out the album cover never went ahead but it got me started on the road to producing my own Tarot cards.

The deck was mostly designed as I went along, I had a schedule of completing each major card in three weeks which set a fairly brisk pace for the whole thing. Schedules can be a two edged sword though, I made quite a few mistakes by trying to force the pace, but then again, I got the project finished - I know quite a few people with a half created deck in the basement! In the end I was quite happy with the end result, although the reproduction wasn't quite as good as I'd hoped. I've also been very pleased with most of the reviews the deck has received, it seems to have been well received by the Tarot community at large.

Mainly because I wanted to create an authentic deck, true to the original designs. I guess it's the scientist in me! Of course, as anyone who's familiar with the tarot will know, there is no absolutely set design to follow because the oldest hand painted Italian decks from the fifteenth century varied considerably in their symbolism. However, One of the earliest consistent designs was the Tarot of Marseille, so I chose to base my deck on that - hence the titles in French and the absence of complex designs on the minor cards. The other reason was practical. Most of the scenes are created using scale models and an enormous amount of work went into each card. The Major Arcana alone took almost two years to complete, if I'd done the minor cards in a similar way it would have simply taken too long.

No not really, there's quite a mish-mash of religious symbolism in the traditional tarots, which I simply followed in The Vision Tarot. It's quite interesting to look at the way artists over the centuries have intertwined the Christian, Wiccan and eastern ideas within the multitude of decks that are now available.

Click here to read a review of the Vision Tarot.
Click here to find out more about buying this deck.

This article was rewritten by Lysander