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 and wellbeing

The linking of drawing with wellbeing and mental health has become central to several local authority and government agendas over the last year or so. So much so that I worry that there is someone out there who thinks that art can in some way replace or fill gaps in the health service that are the result of years of austerity and low levels of funding. A colouring in book in no way replaces proper mental health care. However it is also good to be reminded that art can be a force for good and that a healthy cultural framework does help support wellbeing.

But what is it about drawing that helps us feel better? For myself it is a way of externalising my thoughts and dissolving myself back into the world. 

Many of us are on lockdown because of the global corona virus pandemic. It is a time when many people will face severe challenges to their mental well being, in particular because we are social animals and on being deprived of that social life we struggle with what to replace it with. Drawing can be a way of exploring the fact that a social life isn't just about how we relate to other people, it can help us form new relationships with the wider world. Every morning I go out and walk in order to take some exercise and I always take a sketchbook with me. I make at least one drawing during my time outside, and try to spend at least 20 to 30 minutes on a drawing, which means I have to slow down and concentrate. 

What I have also found useful is to have a particular interest, so that when I'm looking for a subject to draw, I have a filtering device. The other week as I walked through my local woods, I noticed some very rudimentary structures being created. They looked very unfinished and I suspected that they were mostly made by children, but as my walk is very early in the morning, I will never know who builds them, as I come and go before the builders arrive. I see these structures as signs of a desire for shelter, of a need to build things, but none of the people doing the building have the skills to make something robust. Gradually an allegorical idea begins to emerge from observational drawing. 

Unfinished structures: drawings from my sketchbook 

What is perhaps more important is the fact that I have to look carefully at how these things are constructed and in the looking I get lost, and as I get lost I forget about the current problems we all face, and stand there outside in the fresh air being in the moment, experiencing an awareness of something that isn't me and more importantly, the act of concentration on how to make a drawing lets me forget my worries. 

It is important to me that I'm drawing something that is part of the ecology of the woods and that it is a sort of interface between humans and trees. Nobody is destroying anything and the living trees are used by people to lean various lengths of found branches against them, which means that no one is trying to cut them down. I can imagine both a future and a past where these simple structures would be developed much further and would become dwelling places, the important issue being that the structures are built in sympathy with the trees rather than replacing them. As I begin these trains of thought, I'm of course linking myself back into society, thinking something that connects all humans back into the natural world.

The Zulu or Nguni Bantu word 'ubuntu' means, 'humanity' but it can also be understood as 'I am because we are', it is a word that reminds us of a belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all, not just people, but everything. Trees, rocks, dogs, plastic straws, electric light bulbs, the wind, soil and Bob Dylan. 

When people use drawing to find their way out of difficult places, they will often find themselves using imagery that is a metamorphosis between the human body, nature and the world that humans have constructed. It's as if the mind searches for ways to dissolve us back into the environment from which we emerged, a way of healing that recognises our need to be entangled into the fabric of everything. 

This drawing of a head and a church set in a garden by Bobby Baker, fuses together internal imaginary thoughts with memories of real experiences, seamlessly conjoining differences of scale, material and concept. In the drawing below, the waters beneath the head/bridge crossing a brain/lake, flow out into a body/garden, all enmeshed together; memories, dreams and experiences of the world, all finding a place that fits into a coherent idea of something that transcends logic and the different categories that words tend to place the world into. 

From: Bobby Baker's 'visual diary' of her road to recovery from depression.

When the artist Bobby Baker was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, followed by a breast cancer diagnosis, she set out to visualise her experiences by making drawings that gave form to her private catharsis. Baker because she is a professional artist, could like Leonora Carrington another artist that chronicled her own mental breakdown, observe herself at the same time as she was suffering from both these physical and mental issues. The activity of externalising the experiences she went through, though a process of making imagery, seemed to be a vital part of her recovery process. 

Leonora Carrington

In Carrington's case she was a Surrealist and accepted the fact that the subconscious mind was as important to an artist as the world of logic and order. For Carrington as well as Baker confronting their own mental conditions, was also a result of the particular self awareness that artists develop as they try to fine tune their own sensibilities to the world. If artists can help themselves through this process, perhaps they can help others who are not artists to externalise their inner feelings too. 

Shamans also develop often hidden or unconscious links between people the landscape, plants and animals, believing that the wellbeing of someone is dependent on how well an individual is in some sort of empathetic union with their environment. The shaman's job being to re-establish contact with whatever has become disconnected. It was Joseph Beuys that introduced me to the aspect of an artist's role that could be seen as shaman-like and although I only met him a couple of times, his ideas stuck. 

I have over the past year been talking to people about their illnesses and trying to visualise or 'externalise' some of the images that people have about things that are often hidden or difficult to talk about. They have in effect become disconnected with their own bodies. In order to help the process of re-connection I decided to design a set of 52 cards that could be used as an opening gambit for conversations. After trialling and making a few changes I have now been commissioned by the University of Leeds Cultural Institute to have a quantity of packs of these cards printed, so that they can go out to various community groups and be used as part of the Beyond Measure: Research and Evidence in Culture and Health project. This way of working avoids the gallery and in effect makes the pack of cards a travelling exhibition that can be carried around in someone's pocket. 

In the process of drawing and designing the cards I was reminded of how important colour is to feelings of wellbeing and therefore I concentrated on producing the cards as rich colourful images that would initially stimulate thoughts about feeling rather than about any sort of scientific analysis of any medical problem. The cards are designed to begin a conversation and trigger stories and have no healing properties in themselves. However there is an overlap between them and some of the work I have been doing making votives for people who have wanted me to help them externalise and in effect 'banish' a pain or a problem. 

Images of cards and the pack used to contain them

In the case of walking and drawing these are activities that promote wellbeing by directly engaging with the external world and in the cases of Bobby Baker and Leonora Carrington drawing is seen as an activity that directly engages with the internal world of the mind, but that also leads to wellbeing. In the case of the cards, the images of body parts that are set out alongside images of viruses, bacteria or wounds, are drawn images that have been through a process of 'design' to ensure that they all belong to the same family of forms. The cards can be engaged with in a similar way as you would a tarot card game, so there is a different type of physical engagement as you have to initially play with them, rather than contemplate them. All of these approaches are however centred on drawing, drawing that gradually, in the case of the cards, becomes simplified as images are turned into 'icons' or 'symbols'. 

 

Drawing as an approach to communication using image making is a vital tool for human wellbeing and by going 'beyond' the verbal it can help develop an understanding of things in ways that are more 'holistic' and attuned to the body as a whole rather than just the mind. 

See also:

To be absorbed in drawing

Drawing and mindfulness

Notes taken in response to Richard De Marco's Leeds talk on Joseph Beuys

Just do it A reminder not to think about it too much