For a few months now, I have been working on a project where I draw a card at random from my trusty Rider-Waite tarot deck and illustrate it. I have collected tarot decks for most of my life, so my fascination with the imagery runs deep. My first deck, picked out when I was about nine, was the Old English Tarot by Maggie Kneen.
Maggie Kneen’s illustrations are very sweet, full of little animals and pastel colors, but she draws on an elegance of shape and form from medieval illuminations. The result is charming rather than childish. I’m not surprised that this was the deck that I gravitated toward – little girly girl that I was – but I remember having a hard time picking it out because the variety of art styles in tarot decks was baffling. Formats that are variations on a theme are like catnip to creatives, we like to dance on that line between playing along and putting our own spin on it. It seemed like every artist wanted a shot at this weird little card deck, and suddenly I did too.
I proceeded to not do it for several decades. I have lots of excuses, but they don’t really stand up to scrutiny. So when I reached a pause in my life, it was like the project was still waiting for me. With the dead-eyed stare of someone who has been waiting on a bench for several decades, but still waiting.
So far, I have already shown a process photo of a painting experiment that I’m doing with the Temperance card, but I am still thinking carefully about what I want in terms of color, and how much I want the under-drawing to show through. I also don’t really know “what’s next” – how exactly I’ll go about trying to find a publisher when it’s finished. I’ve sketched over twenty cards now, of the seventy nine total, which makes me think that I’m over some sort of invisible hump where I can’t stop, I’m too far through. That’s what I keep telling myself!