Cora's Psychedelic Tarot

I am working on a tarot deck based on my sister's watercolor and oil paintings. Small images can be seen here: http://trzes.spiorad.net/tarot/

Before giving more background information about the project I would like to ask for some spontaneous feedback. How do you like the artwork of the pictures? Do you think the assignment of the pictures is tarot at all? Is the style of the images consistent (enough)? Are there any pictures you particularly don't like or you think they don't fit in?

I am glad about comments of any kind.

The story about this is: When my sister died a year ago she left some one hundred paintings, mainly water color, some in oil. I recently took photos and scans of all of them and made a digital catalog of all her work. The idea was to select the best paintings and print them in small numbers to be given to friends and relatives in remembrance of my sister. But it turned out that many of the paintings are stained, crinkled or torn. And they aren’t always very accurately painted. Since they also aren’t overly detailed anyway they seem to make a much better impression in a rather small print.

Whenever I see a series of images of any kind it will (almost) automatically arrange to a tarot structure in my head. Unsurprisingly enough that happened here as well, although the paintings originally had nothing to do with tarot. The images I put online are a series of digitally slightly improved details of my sister’s paintings with tarot-like names. Printed as a card deck they would make nice gift for people who knew my sister.

These people won’t bother too much about tarot names, but somehow I do like the tarot idea. And my feeling is that it doesn’t work too badly. Of course I don’t trust my own judgment at all. So you may either tell me off about that nonsense and I will print 10 to 20 copies with no numbers or names on the cards and forget about the tarot idea. Or you tell me that the idea has at least some potential and I will print a few copies more, put numbers on the cards and make an extra card with the names. I would then try to sell the extra copies at a (hopefully) moderate price here at ATF and maybe via etsy or my own website.

If you have an opinion please tell me. Every critic is very welcome. I already threw out half the images, maybe it’s been the wrong ones. The old version is at http://trzes.spiorad.net/tartot/taroalt.htm

I'm sorry to hear about your sister, trzes. It's wonderful that you are working to bring her art to people.

This link does not work for me http://trzes.spiorad.net/tartot/taroalt.htm so I am looking at the link in your first post.

The paintings. I like them. I like the vibrant colors and free, easy hand. I can see your choice of titles, too. There are a few that don't work so well, in my opinion. They are the Emperor, Chariot, and Justice. Because of the road, Justice might be the chariot. Since the current chariot and justice are in a different style, though--maybe there's other images that would work better. I like the fool you have up top, and the four elements are wonderful too. I think Transformation should be called Death.

I'm glad you're doing this project. I hope this helps.

Thank you very much, Debra, for your post. I see the problems you have with each of the cards you mentioned.

I don't feel overly comfortable with the emperor either. The trouble is that I wanted a person or a least a face. And this card is the only one of the face/person images with a similar color scheme as the empress, which I found important too. I will try to do something about the contrasts an hues to make it more obvious that the image shows a face at all. Maybe it works.

As for the chariot, I like your idea to use the justice card for it. I was probably too much stuck with the usual image of the chariot having wheels than with the usual symbolism. I see two drawbacks though. Regarding the overall graphical style of the tarot, my feeling is that the current justice is even more inconsistent to the other cards than the current chariot is. And this swap would leave me without any idea for a justice card at all.

In fact justice was the most troublesome of all the cards for me. The correct link to the old version with unused images is: http://trzes.spiorad.net/tarot/tarotalt.htm If anyone has a suggestion for justice (and/or the chariot) from the cards being left out I would be quite happy. But I am afraid I will have to go through the whole collection again and hope to find a candidate I have previously overlooked.

I am happy to call death what it is, specially in the context of making this tarot. Probably I was too much image-driven again, because death is often called transformation when the card doesn't show a skull. Doesn't sound like an overly smart argument to me any more. So transformation will be death again.

Ah.

How about one of the Rulers for the Emperor

Air connector or Fire Elemental for Justice

Fire Demon for Chariot

So have 22 + 4 elementals. That's fairly common for art decks.

Hope this helps.

Wow! How come that the Fire Demon image as chariot didn't occur to me at all? I am quite happy with this idea because I like the image and wanted it to be part of the tarot anyway.

Now that the rulers are out I will use the water ruler image as the emperor. Although I like the current emperor better, but maybe it's too abstract to fit in here.

And the air connector as justice also works for me. It is not exactely what I have in mind, but I think its much better than the previous one. And I like the image and probably won't find a better one. Using the fire elemental image would leave me without a fire card.

Thanks again, Debra, for your ecouragement and for helping me along with my little project. The new version (actually following all of Debra's advice) is now online.

I agree that this is a really great idea, and a wonderful memorial piece. I also agree that the images should match a little more- but it's tough! Maybe if you took a book of- say- raider-waite definitions- and just went one by one going "sadness and desolation- which of her paintings best reflects this?" until you get through all of them. It would be REALLY tough and totally time consuming- but maybe theraputic??
Anyway- the paintings are cool- and I agree that they probably look a little better smaller- my mom's paintings (that she left me when she passed) have the same thing- ok big- but really cool small.
So again- fantastic concept. Great paintings- some of them matched really well- just keep it up and you'll get there for sure.

trzes this is a lovely thing you are doing for your sister - best of luck with your project

silentcitadel said:

Maybe if you took a book of- say- raider-waite definitions- and just went one by one going "sadness and desolation- which of her paintings best reflects this?" until you get through all of them.

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You got a point here, since my knowledge of tarot symbolism is rather limited. I will definetly read more about the symbolism, emotional implications and general meaning of the cards before making a final decision about what image will represent what aracana. My approach was more intuitive so far, from the perspective of a tarot collector rather then that of a tarot reader.

On the other hand, i guess there is a limit to what you can achieve in terms of getting close to "real" tarot when there only is a limited amount of rather random images, that can't be changed any more. If the result should be something that some people can actually read with, that would be more than I expect. And if so, it might only work as a free and purely intuitive oracle deck. That's another reason why there will only be numbers, but no names on the cards. It makes the loose connection to tarot easier to ignore if neccessary.

I think it's a pretty good fit, actually. I'll say more when I have time, which might be a few days.