Tarot Cards

I titled my latest series of paintings Tarot Cards.  Though I know very little about Tarot I am interested in their relationship to Archetypes.   Jung believed that archetypes were universally and innately understood. That all of us, no matter our culture or education had an inert familiarity to these collection of traits embodied in various mythological figures. Supposedly the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck is based on Archetypes. 

My intention in this series was to allow the process to be the content.  I don’t conceptually premeditate paintings anyway, but the shift here was allowing the process of painting to become focal instead of peripheral. I chose to work on a modest size - 18 x 24 inches of 30 to 40 canvases.  The repetition is journalistic. By starting a new painting every studio session it became a visual record of my unconscious.

After posting some of these paintings on Instagram a friend of mine, who studies Tarot, commented that certain paintings reminded her of specific cards. The Tarot cards she suggested were aligned with what I was feeling/thinking during the time of painting. This confirmed my painting practice as a way for my unconscious mind to communicate with my conscious mind, personally as well as collectively. The images were figurative, mostly singular and somehow totemic.

My source material and inspiration is fashion photography.  Models can be viewed as contemporary versions of mythological figures or gods and goddesses.   Just as models are an exaggerated visual expression of current societal ideals so too are Archetypes and Mythological gods.

The Tarot series and my paintings in general depict my personal ‘Hero Journey’. Pictorially displaying my process of untangling emotions intertwined with contextual identity and self-discovery. Through Tarot Cards we seek objective illumination of our inner struggles and triumphs, finding security knowing that we are not lost on our journey nor are we alone.