Tarot ArkLetter - http://www.tarotarkletters.com
By Christine Payne-Towler
ArkLetter 103, October 4, 2013
Here we are at another change of seasons, another turn of the Wheel! Time has just pushed us past my favorite Equinox, the one that heads my Northern Hemisphere compatriots into shorter days and longer nights. As a gardener I am always in a hurry for Spring to come, but by Fall I'm tired and therefore thrilled to see the shorter days. It sounds great to light a fire in the fireplace and layer on the socks and long sleeves. If you are living in the Southern Hemisphere as you read this, happy spring! For the rest of us, may your Fall be brisk and colorful, and may all my readers be blessed with insight and optimism.
This has been a very eventful month. All the formal chapters for our book, The Tarot of the Holy Light; A Modern Continental Tarot are now set up and formatted, awaiting the fine-toothed comb-out that is the final proof process. Six months ago I was losing sleep in with a generalized anxiety that, despite all of our best efforts, some tangential blindside blow would rise up to knock us off course and prove me to be a liar again. Further delays could still happen, of course, but seeing all eight formal chapters (as well as all of the 78-card essays) laid out in their final form is helping me feel secure again. I have also received an offer I can't refuse from a very professional proofreader who -- joy of joys! -- lives right here in my neighborhood. Someone is watching over this project!
Meanwhile Michael is spinning his magic to provide our volume with beauty as well as utility. The number of occult diagrams that are required has challenged us both. No commercial book editor would allow us to get away with being so self-indulgent with graphics as we are! This is the summation of my life's work to date, which leaves me disinclined to cut corners. No doubt I'll be fully revealed for the Fool that I truly am -- history will have to either forgive me or forget me. Since this is the "child" of my second Saturn Return, I am deeply grateful simply to have lived long enough to see it come to fruition.
One delightful development of the last month is that Michael received an excellent and very beautiful set of art prints of the Tarot Trumps from a mad silkscreen maker in France named Antoine Duthoit. Duthoit one of those do-it-yourself folks who became possessed with the idea of making his own "Taaro". He says he doesn't have a lot of experience with Tarot, but he's obviously very gifted as an artist and as an iconographer. You can see his tattoo-inspired art, an overview of his production process and some images from his pack at his website:
http://mugwupbooks.blogspot.fr/
A lot of considerations have to be addressed when a person starts into such a project, as any aspiring Tarot maker quickly discovers. Having been a passive consumer of decks for most of my career, I never had to concern myself with the why's and wherefores of making the imagery before. Michael, on the other hand, has been involved with the comics industry for the last 30 years or more, so he's acutely aware of the challenges facing anybody who is trying to render a "picture worth a thousand words".
Saying everything in one image is the iconographist's highest calling. Every line is vital, there can be no wasted gestures. Effort has to be made to convey depth and motion without relying on verbal cues. If faces or bodily forms are included, motive and personality must exude from every feature. The design needs to be impregnated with intentionality, so that it can wordlessly resonate it's message and their corresponding thoughts, feelings and sensations to the viewer.
The artist has the responsibility to provide the "point of view" of the rendering. He or she has to present the focal features of the story in the foreground, while reinforcing the backstory by embedding clues throughout the larger design. This is done very deliberately, to send the viewer the most important concepts in the correct order for best comprehension at a glance. Qualities of color and light present yet another set of variables to control. Empty space is also a huge design element, giving shape and heft to the "nothing" between the "something". Finally, the addition of numbers, letters, symbols and glyphs can either split the mind away from the image, or assist the viewer to see the image, depending on how they are placed and presented. No two people will agree about these details, but every artist needs to objectively break their subject down along these lines before an idea can be effectively rendered.
All of these considerations have been addressed in this little pack of 22 icons, which was clearly designed to be seen "in the round" (witness the tattoo gallery seen at http://antoineduthoit.free.fr/) On the printed page, we find the Trumps hanging in their guilded space, devoid of a terrestrial context. This gives us a clue that this pack offers windows into the Astral plane, glimpses of the energy-world where the line that separates "entities" from "vibrational states" is less easily discerned. The artist's dense, crenelated lines entwine and confuse the eye, giving an effect that both conceals and reveals in turn.The motion and texture embedded in the pale gold background patterns (which might be taken to represent the four Elements) possesses metallic shimmer and sparkle that winks up through the black ink, causing the foreground designs to "pop" as you look at them. The effect is surrealistic -- nothing holds still, the images seethe against their backdrops like spirits appearing in the smoke of an incense burner.
Duthoit's debt to the Japanese Ukiyo-e style is obvious, once we adjust our visual settings to discern the fantastical portraits that stare out of these very substantial 'graven' images. He somehow manages to convey both a primitive sensibility (the forceful, heavy cuts of his carvings, the imaginary animals rendered as graffiti and/or tattoo flash) alongside great refinement and subtlety (the shimmer of gold, the fine art paper and the elegant interwoven designs emerging from their energetic tangles). He has also adopted a set of classical Japanese symbols to carry continuity through the cards -- straight sharp swords, a stringed instrument, an elaborate scroll case, parasols, a lantern, and of course the incredible flowing robes and carved belt-ornaments modeled by the mythical beasts who wear them. I don't recognize all of these hybrid animals, but the Empress is a sweet-faced hen, and Strength is a most lovely giant carp.The occasional human suggestion is made by either portraying a skeleton (in the Lovers card, there are two of them intertwined), or by grafting an animal-spirit's head onto a human body. I instinctively want to read these as symbols of shamanic transformation, and I wonder about their significance in the Japanese bestiary that (I fondly imagine) these fantastic animals marched out of. Do they all bear a lesson along with them, like the animals of Aesop's Fables? (The Hanged Man, by startling contrast, appears to be decapitated, or perhaps those features on his writhing body are his face.)
For all the intensity of the imagery and refinement of their presentation, there remains a streak of light-heartedness interwoven in it all. Duthoit has deliberately butchered the spelling of the Trump names, sometimes contracting them and sometimes mutating them entirely. The Fool is Maat, a fabulous Samurai lizard bristling with swords, who has just chopped off his own head and is wiping his sword! Also, at first glance, I saw the Devil as a dragon-headed bruiser riding on a motorcycle. (Does this throne have wheels?) The artist's interpretations of the Trump subjects is certainly idiosyncratic, but not to the point where the original theme is destroyed. For those who are in tune with his range of artistic influences, this looks to be a marvelously evocative pack of Trumps.
A bonus is granted when you scroll down through Duthoit's Tarot card site and mosey into the other screen prints he is sharing. You will find a self-portrait that's just a scream! Another snap of the artist at work conveys a distinct twinkle of humor and acute perceptiveness that borders on wizardry. All of these qualities are amply expressed in Duthoit's 22 Arcanes majeures pour un jeu de Tarot divinatoire.
I do need to mention that these cards aren't meant to be shuffled! I wouldn't want to wear them out or scuff the edges, since they don't have any kind of glaze or coating to protect them. They are quite large, roughly 5" by 8". Duthoit might be open to transferring these designs onto a true deck of cards, and I'm sure he's capable of creating a full pack of Pips to go with his Trumps. However, with his do-it-yourself ethos, such an endeavor might just take too many years to complete. For those of us who want to bring these shamanic images into their Tarot practice, one can use any ordinary Tarot to lay out the spread, and then should any Trumps appear, one can search through Duthoit's pack to see what his version will add to the mix.
That's it for this month. Enjoy the Fall!
blessings,
Christine
ArkLetter 103, October, 2013
copyright christine payne-towler 2005-2013, all rights reserved
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