The Influence of the Tarot

Votive cards

I have had made several decks of cards based both on my personal image bank and in response to collaborative conversations with other people, and in the back of my mind when I have done so, I had images of the tarot card decks that I have come across at various times in my life. In particular, I was when a young man, captivated by the writing of Italo Calvino and his novel 'The Castle of Crossed Destinies', whereby the Tarot embeds itself into life. As the novel unfolds we see how meaning is created by symbolic interpretation. This approach to story telling triggered for myself a lifelong awareness of possible symbolic meanings that might be found in the images that at various times have welled up from my sub-conscious. Calvino also stimulated a life long interest in Jung and his idea of archetypes. 

Calvino's story is centred on a meeting of travellers who are inexplicably unable to speak after passing through a forest. The characters in the novel can only tell of their adventures using tarot cards, the narrator acting as a tarot card 'reader'. By juxtaposing word and image Calvino asks questions as to what drives the stories we inhabit. The author–narrator–character–reader relationship is constantly questioned and we are drawn into the story both as a reader and as an author. 

The Tarot as laid out by Calvino

In recognition of the importance of the Tarot in relation to a more mystical reading of recent art history, the Warburg Institute has put on an exhibition of tarot cards; 'Tarot - Origins & Afterlives', and it is on until 30th April. 

The Tarot, Mixed media by J.B. Alliette (Etteilla). c1788

I have always been interested in how narratives can be developed by sequencing, and I have sometimes used the tarot card idea as a way to make up storyboards. In our western society we tend to read text from left to right, and from top to bottom, so we lay out tarot cards the same way. But tarot readings laid out in this way have a far more interesting narrative consequence, because once the cards have been laid out, new readings can then be undertaken, dependent upon the way patterns can be found. Diagonal, vertical and horizontal readings can be undertaken, or clusters of formal relationships, such as rectangles of four or the cards that form a border around all the others, or every other card. Geometry and sequence is used to carry threads of ideas. The visual nature of the tarot breaks the linear conventions associated with a written story and questions whether or not a narrative always has to have a beginning, middle and an end. 

I have returned to the card deck as a generator of narrative connections several times, each time however I have tried to set up a slightly different approach. 

The Western World was my first attempt to develop the idea. I came up with 50 images and each one had a poetic text written to accompany it which was to go on the back of each card. You can get the idea by clicking on the Western World link. I was at the time trying to respond to the Gulf War and the then US president George Bush had been getting 'wanted' posters made of the main villains such as Saddam Hussein. It struck me that he was probably someone who in his youth had like myself played at 'Cowboys and Indians'. Perhaps, I thought, this was a myth now inhabiting his head, which was shaping decisions being made by what was then, the most powerful man in the world. By numbering the cards I gave them an initial sequential narrative, but as you laid them out, I was hoping new stories might be found as someone began to find patterns and as they did they could turn the cards over to read the poems underneath. 

Eventually I put the cards together in both a poster and book formats, thus freezing the narrative into a particular order. 

Two cards from the Western World series: 46 and 47

Back of card 46

I have since persisted in making other attempts to work in this area. The first set to be printed as cards, and with a specially designed box was a group of 52 'story cards'. These were cards with images on them that I was at the time using to create narratives. 

Story cards

This was a simple idea and it seemed to go down well, as people bought quite a few sets and I also used them to create mini exhibitions. They were even used as part of my role at the College of Art, other staff being encouraged to shuffle them and lay out cards in order for narratives to be triggered. These cards were the same size as playing cards and then a couple of years later I decided to make a set that were much more like Taro cards. This new set, again of 52, was the same size as a traditional Taro deck and had suits. 

The card backs were simply white 0s on black and the edges had permutations of - marks set into them, which meant that when you laid them out after shuffling, that certain visual configurations were suggested if you attempted to connect the - marks. Immediately users began to use these marks as a weighting system, so the branching vein/tree image, with 6 - marks, would be read as of highest value. People had to decide for themselves what each of the suits meant and I was always fascinated as to what they came up with. You can still access these cards via my website. I haven't updated it for several years but it still operates. See.

Then whilst I was working with votives I was commissioned to design a set of cards that would help older men begin to open up about their various illnesses. These were designed, printed and then distributed to various men's community centres across Leeds and after an initially quite good response, the project was shelved because of covid. 

Votive cards as they appear on the website

You can still shuffle the cards if you go to the website and I have several packs left, people occasionally asking me for a pack when they come across the project, which is archived here. 

A couple of years ago I was asked to join in a collaborative project that was designed to celebrate the 56 Group, a Welsh based artists' organisation, that I had first come across when I was a student in Newport. I was paired with the artist Tiff Oben and we came up with the idea of a set of tea cards. We would send  texts as catalysts to each other and we used them to develop 25 cards each, for a final set of 50. I think it was Tiff that came up with the idea, as she had a relative that had a set of old tea cards framed on a wall. I was of course very happy to develop another card set, as well as to work in collaboration, which I always find forces me to be inventive. I was at the same time beginning to work on images driven by my interest in interoception, so the two projects began to overlap and I saw Tiff's prompts as being similar to the discussions held by participants in my interoception workshops. 

For instance, at one point Tiff sent this text, 'Everyday we walk over the monuments of what came before. Some we see. Others are so deeply buried we barely have an inkling of them. But all make us who we are'. I then in response came up with the foot that did the walking. My own text to accompany the image, then became a reflection of the pain I was often getting in my feet due to plantar fasciitis. I then went back and reworked the foot image in response to what I had written.

Halting Implosion: A set of 50 cards (These are my 25)

There are so many artists that have been influenced by the tarot, that it's impossible to look in any depth at the issue within the narrow confines of a blog post, suffice it to say that Surrealist artists were deeply influenced by the possibilities the tarot opened out. When she was heading up the gallery at Leeds College of Art, and what is now Leeds Arts University, the curator Dr Catriona McAra often focused her attention on women Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington. It was for myself so refreshing to see the work of, at the time, very underestimated Surrealists. Then at the 59th Venice Biennale, in 2022, "The Milk of Dreams, there was an exhibition showcasing many of the women Catriona had already brought to my attention, a reminder that artists might fade out of sight, but at some point they come back into focus, when society is ready for them. So perhaps I'll leave this post with two images by one of Carrington's friends Remedios Varo, who was herself deeply influenced by the tarot, as well as some of Carrington's own tarot card designs.

Remedios Varo

Remedios Varo

The Devil: Leonora Carrington

The world: Leonora Carrington

Death: Leonora Carrington

See also: 

The continuing influence of Surrealism 

Fuseli and modern women

Drawing from the old masters

Languages of paper and cardboard

A report from the 'Milk of Dreams'

Drawing the dead and the dying

 

When my mother was dying I used to go down to my home town every weekend to see her and sit with her. I drew her several times and when she finally passed away I made images from the drawings as a way to come to terms with how I felt about her death. She was always surrounded by her 'tranculments', which had by then mainly been placed in glass fronted cabinets, but several, such as the swan vases, still adorned any spare surface, such as the top of the TV. I could find myself dizzy with the carpet pattern, often just looking for somewhere to rest my eyes, and when they rested on her, she seemed the most insubstantial thing in the room. I have a drawing of her where she literally dissolves into her chair and others where she becomes manic in her distress or lost in her bed. One drawing I made of her in bed, shows her dissolving into the pillow, whilst the bedspread becomes a repository of stories from her life. I drew all sorts of events that she had told me about, including the time when her sister Mary had trapped her foot in a rail line junction point, and how they were terrified a train would come. I tried to remember when she was happy and times when we were together, but there were many sad times too. Eventually the bedspread was covered with memories. 

When I first met Paulo Luís Almeida, he was giving a talk about his own response to a parent dying. He drew his father during the last years of his life as he succumbed to Parkinson’s disease, and Paulo spoke about the erosion of language and the disappearance of his father's world. Paulo went on to say that drawing 'incited a memorialising function of the trace'. Empathy was in his case the key issue, whilst for myself it was simply loss.

Paulo Luís Almeida: Untitled 2011

Maggie Hambling drew both her mother and her father as they were dying. 

Maggie Hambling

Hambling's drawings use a searching line that I feel attempts to give back life to the dead. Her own energy of looking is locked into these images forever, and when she has herself passed on, she will still exist in the frozen moments of her looking. 

Occasionally Foundation students used to ask me if they could get to draw dead people and the only person I knew at the time that had a way in to do this was Brian Holmes. I remember that I drew his portrait at one time, as he used to live just around the corner from where I lived in Kirkstall, however where that drawing is now I haven't a clue and he is now long dead, a reminder that every portrait ever made is in fact a memento mori. Brian was at one point commissioned by the School of Medicine of the University of Leeds to paint a mural detailing the history of Leeds Medical School and that meant he had access to their facilities, including the dissection area.

Brian Holmes: Detail of Leeds Medical School 

Brian Holmes: Foot: Etching

Brian used to go in to the anatomy area and draw bodies and could occasionally, if asked, get a student to go in with him. One of the students that asked me if he could get access was Damien Hirst, who always asserts that he was influenced by his visits to the anatomy department of Leeds Medical School and that he made anatomical drawings there. None of these drawings seem to have surfaced, but the photograph 'With dead head' has become an iconic part of his oeuvre. I'm not even sure if Brian was able to get Damien in and Damien may well have found a different way to get access, the point being that it was his association with the ever present idea of death, that to some extent signalled him out at the time as an artist of significance. 

Théodore Géricault on His Deathbed: Charles Emile Callande de Champmartin

Théodore Géricault was well known for painting and drawing the dead. In fact the image above was thought to be by him until a cleaning revealed the signature of his friend and follower Charles Emile Champmartin. Ironically the painting actually depicts Géricault himself on his deathbed. At the time, he was such an iconic trope of the tragic Romantic artist, that copies of his death mask were often found in young artists’ studios. 

Géricault: Deathmask

We all have to confront death at some time, it is a normal part of life and most cultures have embedded within them ways to come to terms with this fact. Except I feel our own, where we rarely see dead people.  Perhaps we all need to remember that we are dying, and in doing so, we might value life that much more. 

Head of the dead Christ: Durer

During the many years that Christianity formed the dominant religion of the Western World, images of the dead or dying Christ were available for everyone to see. People were constantly therefore being reminded of how death was a central fact of life. In traditional Buddhist teachings, contemplating death is an integral part of meditation. Buddha states that death is “the greatest of all teachers”; it teaches us to be humble, destroys vanity and pride and crumbles all the barriers of caste, creed and race that divide humans, for all living beings are destined to die. 

Kusôzu

Perhaps we need a return to the old Japanese Buddhist tradition of Kusôzu, whereby images were made of the sequential decay of a cadaver; not pretty but a clear message. The Roman Egyptian idea of encaustic "Fayum portraits," which were placed over the heads of mummies in coffins, is an interesting take on mortality and portraiture. These were not only realistic depictions of the deceased, the images were kept on the walls of the houses of the living and then when someone died they would be transferred to the coffin. So you would have been very aware that when the artist came to do your portrait, that its final resting place would be the same as yours. Being made in encaustic, which is an amazingly long lasting paint material, your image would like Dorian Gray stay youthful, whilst you would decay like Gray's portrait. Wilde's neat role reversal idea, in many ways highlighting our mortal condition.

A Fayum portrait

If I had to show one image that transcended the genre it would be the one below by Käthe Kollwitz. Kollwitz drew the workers that she met, particularly women who struggled to keep themselves alive under the most harsh conditions. In this image the woman you feel can see her own death in a not very far off future, a black ghost already sitting at her shoulder. But at the same time Kollwitz has found a deep humanity in this woman, she is a solid yet wonderfully delicate presence, on the one hand to be blown away by the trials of a hard life and yet on the other she is preserved, rock like, in all her dignity within Kollwitz's drawing. She is always in that moment that she appeared to Kollwitz, time past, present and future unravel and we are forever in the now of her being. 

 

Käthe Kollwitz

See also:

What is a portrait?

Drawing and spirituality

Memory drawing and hands

Bringing the inanimate to life

Alina Popa: Disease as an aesthetic project

The myth of the artist

Celia Paul, Gwen John and Curtis Holder

Dat

Artis

Jonathan Richardson's self-portraits

Self portrait: Foot pain and its emotional effects

I have been making drawings and printed images of people, whereby I listen to them talk to me about their internal perceptions, (interoceptions) of pain, emotion and other inner body feelings. Essentially what I am making are a series of portraits, but images that attempt to reflect the interior world of people, rather than their external appearance. My fellow researcher at the Leeds Arts University, Dawn Woolley is focused on the photographic selfie, so it feels as if we have both interior and exterior awareness covered.

When thinking about a history that might lie behind my approach, I began by looking at expressionist portraiture, but as I dug around the subject, the more I came across the self portraits of Jonathan Richardson. 

Jonathan Richardson, Self-portrait, c. 1735

Richardson made hundreds of drawn self portraits over a period of several years. This type of serial facial analysis looked at from a present perspective, feels very modern. For instance in relation to expressionist portraits, in three of his more prolific years, Vincent van Gogh, drew and painted himself over 40 times. and as photography has become the main form of facial representation, serial portraits, such as Jo Spence's 'Brave' series, have become central to documentary practices.

Jonathan Richardson, Self-portrait, c. 1738

Richardson even went back to earlier work and made drawn copies of his self-portraits from paintings made many years earlier. Most of his self portraits are however drawn from life, using a variety of materials, including pen and ink, graphite on vellum but mainly black and white chalks on blue paper.

Jonathan Richardson Self-portrait as a poet, c. 1732

Jonathan Richardson, Self-portrait, c. 1728

During his early career as a portrait painter he defined his trade in this way, "a portrait is a sort of General History of the Life of the Person it represents, not only to Him who is acquainted with it, but to Many Others, who upon Occasion of seeing it are frequently told, of what is most Material concerning Them, or their General Character at least." However his later self-portraits, which are nearly all dated, are not a ‘General History’ of his life, they are far too particular. They represent the complexity of an inner emotional life, rather than the status or occupation of the sitter.

Jonathan Richardson Self-portrait at the age of thirty, 1735

Jonathan Richardson Self-portrait, 1736

I find his portraits intriguing, especially how with slight differences in the openness of an eye, or width of a face, as well as by changing materials, he can give quite different impressions as to what he is thinking about as he gazes at himself. His images can feel very confident, or fragile, slightly sly or arrogant, quizzical or poetic but they don't feel forced or exaggerated as in Charles le Brun's  work or Messerschmitt portraits.

Charles le Brun: The expressions

Messerschmitt: Character Head

I first came across Jonathan Richardson in the chapter 'Searching for the self' in Susan Owens' excellent book, 'The Story of Drawing'. It is a book well worth a read if you are interested in how drawing supports the various ways that artists think about what it is that they do. We might value painting far more, but it is often an artist's drawings that reveal their thoughts and the roots of their sensibilities; the paintings or sculptures done afterwards often covering up the thinking surrounding an idea's gestation.

Richardson's portraits reminded me that you don't need to go 'over the top' when looking for expression and that it is often in small details that a telling communication is made. He also made his self portraits as he neared the end of his career, something I am also doing. It being a time to continue working if you still have the capability but the pressure to earn money or get out there to make your name is less and you can therefore reflect more on what you have done and how perhaps you can do it in a more interesting or personal way. 

See also:

What is a portrait?

Self portrait drawings

The portrait as witness and control 

The Lamed Vavniks

Portraits and time

Drawing it all together

Dancing and Occult Chemistry

I'm very aware that as I make a drawing my body performs a series of movements that could be thought of as a type of dance routine. Back in the 1960s when I worked at the steelworks, we had a time and motion expert come in to analyse the various jobs that we did and in that analysis I for the first time saw the possibilities of some sort of 'work dance', one that however had military overtones.

Motion efficiency study by Frank Gilbreth, c. 1914.

Frank Gilbreth was a pioneering management consultant, who invented the use of cyclegraphs as a way to improve the efficiency of repetitive tasks. The image above could both be used as an example of how a relentlessly monitored production line could dehumanise people and as an idea for a type of choreography and its documentation. As I sit at my drawing desk, I'm sure a time-lapse image of my movements would not be that dissimilar, except for the matter of my taking a break whenever I want to.

Movement and its understanding can be both a form of control, (think army marching displays as in the Edinburgh military tattoo) and an expression of freedom.

Military geometry 

At a sub-atomic level all is movement and one of the earliest twentieth century attempts to describe the invisible structures that lie beneath perceived reality was Besant’s and Leadbeater’s 'Occult Chemistry', published in London by the Theosophical Publishing Society in 1908. I have mentioned Besant and Leadbeater in previous posts, mainly because of their interest in visualising thought forms and their book 'Occult Chemistry' subtitled, 'Clairvoyant observations on the chemical elements', is a fascinating example of how an awareness of eastern religious practices was at that time beginning to influence western approaches to visualising the unknown. 

From: Occult Chemistry

This is how they describe visualising a hydrogen atom in chapter two:

'Turning to the force side of the atom and its combinations, we observe that force pours in the heart-shaped depression at the top of the atom, and issues from the point, and is changed in character by its passage; further, force rushes through every spiral and every spirilla, and the changing shades of colour that flash out from the rapidly revolving and vibrating atom depend on the several activities of the spirals; sometimes one, sometimes another, is thrown into more energetic action, and with the change of activity from one spiral to another the colour changes.'

From Occult Chemistry: The complexities of a hydrogen atom

I was fascinated by the relationship between atomic structure and the organs of the body and tried to develop their atom image as a beating heart. Edwin Babbitt had also proposed an atom of this form in his text "Principles of Light and Colour," His model of the atom was a globular structure composed of spirals and spirillae, with three movements: rotation, orbital motion, and pulsation and I think it would have been Babbitt's idea that was used as a model for Besant and Leadbeater’s diagrams. 

Atom heart dynamo

The visualisations of Besant and Leadbeater, as well as Babbitt, in some ways resemble those eventually developed in relation to Niels Bohr’s theory of atomic structure and the related laws of quantum mechanics; initially these structures were visualised as electrons in orbit, then they became cloud-like and illustrated as fuzzy-edged three-dimensional geometries, such as vibrating spheres, misty toruses or out of focus dumbbells. I suspect that our ideas of the sub-atomic world will look like something very different in another hundred years time. 

A radium atom visualised using Bohr’s theory of atomic structure

Besant and Leadbeater stated, “The atom can scarcely be said to be a ‘thing’, though it is the material out of which all things physical are composed”. “It is" they further stated, "formed by the flow of the life-force and vanishes with its ebb.” This reflects some of our earliest human ideas of religion; ideas that arose out of the contemplation of what happens when someone or something 'stops', when movement comes to an end and things die. 

We now tend to think of the sub-atomic world as being composed of wave energies, energy and movement being conjoined. As living beings, in order to respond to experiences, we rely on the constant movement of our sensors in relation to what is out there; we experience this movement as 'life' and its expression is at its most heightened as dance. 

The passepied an old French court dance. 

The structure of the passepied is not unlike the spiral structures that thread through the atoms as envisioned by Besant and Leadbeater. As the body moves through three dimensional spaces, it forms interlocking wave structures, that if for a moment are realised as diagrams that can be seen as similar to the visualisations produced for Occult Chemistry.

Choreography: Laban diagrams and William Forsythe's Space Trace Notation

A visualisation of the sodium atom from Occult Chemistry

Figure in a dodecahedron

I am always looking for ways to link the various threads that arrive within my weekly musings on drawing, searching for how I can come to some sort of personal understanding about what I'm thinking about. I have recently found an article by David A. Becker which has helped me to see how certain strands could be linked together. Music, brain structure, chemistry and geometry are all fused together in his article, 'A Peculiary Cerebroid Convex Zygo-Dodecahedron is an Axiomatically Balanced "House of Blues": The Circle of Fifths to the Circle of Willis to Cadherin Cadenzas'.  He wrote this abstract for his article in the journal 'Symmetry'.

'A bilaterally symmetrical convex dodecahedron consisting of twelve quadrilateral faces is derived from the icosahedron via a process akin to Fuller’s Jitterbug Transformation. The unusual zygomorphic dodecahedron so obtained is shown to harbor a bilaterally symmetrical jazz/blues harmonic code on its twelve faces that is related to such fundamental music theoretical constructs as the Circle of Fifths and Euler’s tonnetz. Curiously, the patterning within the aforementioned zygo-dodecahedron is discernibly similar to that observed in a ventral view of the human brain. Moreover, this same pattern is arguably evident during development of the embryonic pharynx. A possible role for the featured zygo-dodecahedron in cephalogenesis is considered. Recent studies concerning type II cadherins, an important class of proteins that promote cell adhesion, have generated data that is demonstrated to conform to this zygo-dodecahedral brain model in a substantially congruous manner.' 

(Becker 2012)

I have previously commented on the way that bi-lateral symmetry has affected our relationship with the world and how we think about it, especially as someone that spends many hours drawing on bilaterally symmetrical sheets of paper. This symmetry is of course reflected in the layout of our nervous systems and in the context of brain connectivity van den Heuvel and Sporns have posited that the human brain contains a bilaterally symmetrical group of twelve major interconnected neuronal hubs that Becker (2012) has linked to our propensity to respond to particular musical rhythms. A relationship illustrated beautifully by John Coltrane's drawing of a circle of fifths that I used in a previous post, as an illustration of the relationship between rhythm and our spatial understanding.

John Coltrane. Untitled (circle of fifths), 1967

Many years ago I used to tap dance, and I recently found an old pair of my tap shoes in the basement, perhaps its time to revisit my inner body rhythms and to see if my feet have more awareness of these issues than my hands. When I began teaching I noticed some of the older staff wore brogue shoes with solid heels and when they strode out into the studio, they used the sound of their clip-clop rhythm, to both get immediate attention and in Patrick Oliver's case to teach students about the relationship between rhythm and space. What I do feel is that it is the bilaterally symmetrical body that 'knows' these things and that the head follows slowly behind. In the head's embryonic development its pharyngeal arches, pouches, and clefts, are derived from the implications of formal possibilities of the icosahedron and it's cells will remember that, especially when the head twists around as the body is dancing. 

UV Map* of my bilaterally symmetrical body made using Maya

*A UV Map is a type of vertex map that stores vertical and horizontal positions on a 2D texture. The letters U (Horizontal) and V (Vertical) denote the axes of the 2D texture because X, Y and Z are used to denote the axes of the 3D space. (Vertex = graph)

I look at the map of myself above and see the possibilities of laying it over a star chart. This week I'm designing cosmic tableware and am thinking about what the tablecloth should look like and am getting close to an idea that welds together drawings of the curved time/space that is gravity and the body map. 

Space time curvature

The cheese platter has already been made in the form of a moon sitting on a sun. 

Soup bowls

Design for batik tablecloth

This is another one of my tranculment ideas. The point being that the things which we surround ourselves with in 'ordinary life' can become entries into a more mythic everyday.

From the micro to the macro is another theme that seems to run through my ideas and as I work through this stuff in my head I remember something else. In the large wall drawing 'Planetary Dance' by Anna Halprin, she presented rituals consisting of explanatory diagrams with accompanying text. Back in 2017 at the Venice Biennale Halprin was offering us a chance to help heal the world by joining its peoples together in a healing set of dances. I took a couple of photographs of the diagrams she drew and they sort of close the circle of my thoughts today on these things and help me link up my various ramblings.

Anna Halprin

At one point in their dancing, participants had blow breath through their hands into the sky and when they do this we are linked back to the chemistry of breath, the exchange of gases, oxygen and carbon dioxide, that takes place between the body and its environment during respiration, but that's another story.

References

Becker, D.A., (2012) A Peculiarly Cerebroid Convex Zygo-Dodecahedron is an Axiomatically Balanced “House of Blues”: The Circle of Fifths to the Circle of Willis to Cadherin Cadenzas. Symmetry, 4(4), pp.644-666.

Morrisson, M. S. (2009) Occult Chemistry and the Theosophical Aesthetics of the Subatomic World RACAR: Revue d'art canadienne, 34(1), pp.86-97.

van den Heuvel, M.P.; Sporns, O. (2011) Rich-Club organization of the human connectome. Journal of Neuroscience 31, 15775–15786. 

See also:

Maps made by our nervous systems

Horizontality and the body

Body cartography

The micro and the macro

Jorinde Voigt: Drawing as abstraction and notation