Adam's Tarot WeblogEntries from 12th December 2008.
Go to Archive 1 - entries from 21st November 2006 to 30th April 2007.
Go to Archive 2 - entries from 1st May 2007 to 1st November 2007.
Go to Archive 3 - entries from 2nd November 2007 to 30th November 2008.
To contact Adam, email adam@alchemywebsite.com
Click here to join the Art Tarots emailing list. Click here to see the Tarots Collectors Forum.
3 July 2009
I have now finished the next tarot in the Art Tarot series. This is The Javanese Folktales Tarot with wonderfully harmonious artwork by Andhika Wijaya. You can see details and buy it by clicking here.
This is the twentieth tarot in my ever growing Art Tarot series which was set up to allow wonderful tarot decks like this to be published in card form.
1 July 2009
Today I finished cutting up the next tarot deck in my Art Tarot series. It really looks wonderful. I will have to spent a day or so making them up into boxes and then prepare the advertising and payment buttons onto my web page. So it should be ready, say on Friday. Look out for the announcement !
30 June 2009
Here are some photographs from the opening night of my 'Art of Japanese Tarot' exhibition at Kilbirnie. This is the second showing, the first was at the Glasgow School of Art. I am the rather out-of-place buffoon in the blue Salvador Dali tee shirt, as it was so hot I just could not bear wearing a shirt and jacket. My colleague Ronnie Heeps who curated the exhibition was smartly and rather formally dressed - you can see us both in the final photo.
26 June 2009
Today my exhibition on Japanese tarot moves to a new site. A local library in the town of Kilbirnie has recently developed an art gallery space and asked if they could mount my work as its inaugural exhibition. So later today Ronnie Heeps the curator, Pat Smith who made the video and I will travel down to be at the opening.
19 June 2009
I recently received Lo Scarabeo's Tarot of the Dream Enchantress. Who exactly is she? Well Lo Scarabeo don't even seem to know. But she spends a great deal of her time inhabiting the Minors, naked or scantily dressed. In the Majors, with a number of exceptions, she shows her more demure and modest side, even dressing up in order to undertake some alchemical experiments.
18 June 2009
Today a rather delightful tarot arrived from Hungary. This was created by Martina Miskolczi and exhibited in Budapest in February. She was persuaded by the members of the Tarot Collectors Forum to make a small edition (21 decks) with an accompanying book. So I am very pleased to have been among the lucky purchasers.
16 June 2009
As this weblog was getting rather lengthy at well over 200K, I have archived a section into a new Archive 3. The total weblog amounts to over 400k of text, and 30 megabytes of images, so it is already a significant and well visited resource with between two and three hundred visitors a day.
15 June 2009
A week or so back I received a copy of a 78 card Rider Waite clone from Poland with artwork by Robert Lichodziejewski. It is a rather nice production with large cards, is inexpensive and easily available internationally from various Polish online bookshops. It sticks close to the original images with a few quirky additions - I especially liked the aboriginal angels playing didgeridoos on Judgement. The minors mirror the emblematic forms on the Rider Waite.
13 June 2009
I also received another circular tarot in the last few days, this time from Argentina. This is the Tarot Egipcio Circular from a company called A.G. These are large 4.25 inches (110mm) diameter circular cards. Each of the 78 cards is printed with the face of one of the Gizeh Pyramids with the central space being occupied with a kind of cartouche form, more oval in shape than the usual Egyptian cartouche. This is divided into three zones, the central having a drawing in the style of the incised figures from the walls of Egyptian tombs, with some influences from the Wegener-Falconnier Egyptian tarot. These are, in fact, a repainted version of the Egipcios deck issued some twenty of so years ago by Editorial Kier in Argentina and U.S. Games.
12 June 2009
Beth Seilonen had done it again - surprised me with a new tarot. She is so inventive. This, the Goddess Round, consists of circular cards. She has issued this as a very small edition of only five decks. I find myself the proud owner of number 1. I can see why she has limited the edition to this size. She had to cut out the cards by hand ! I can imagine her working long into the evening for a few nights at the rather boring task of cutting out the circles.
12 June 2009
One of my fellow tarot collectors has now informed me that the Let's Tarot Nintendo game was supplied with the cards, and these were thus an integral part of the package and not an associated promotional item.
8 June 2009
Nintendo issued a tarot system, Let's Tarot, for their game platform in 2007. This was issued with a tarot deck designed by Midori Fujimori. The designs are entirely conventional, but have a very high quality line art with sensitive and harmonious colouring. Sadly, for some reason they chose to print the cards a few millimetres too large to fit within the case. This makes me think that these were supplied as a promotional gift, and not issued with all the game cartridges.
7 June 2009
I have today just completed the production of the Taro of the British occultist and surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun. This was recently discovered by Richard Shillitoe who worked with me in making these strange abstract designs available in print for the first time. They were exhibited briefly in 1977. She was a painter and writer and along with Eileen Agar and Leonora Carrington, was one of the best-known English women surrealists. A friend of André Breton, she was also associated with Aleister Crowley. Her Taro is an example of a kind of abstract surrealism. She was deeply studied in the Golden Dawn tradition of magic, and wrote a well known book on the subject The Sword of Wisdom, 1975 as well as a strange allegorical novel or gothic fantasy The Goose of Hermogenes, 1971, and other works on Cornwall and Ireland. This is the nineteenth tarot that I have published
6 June 2009
I have now received an Egyptian Tarot produced in Brasil, the Tarô Egipcio. The watercoloured paintings are by Auri Campolonghi Gonella and appear to be based on an interpretation by Marco Daffi of the symbolism of the Bembine Table 'Disposizione dei Trionfi in rapporto alla Tavola Bembina' Kemi-Hathor, Volume 14, N. 79, January 1996. The artwork is rarther modern and I cannot immediately see the connection with the Bembine Table. The 22 cards are not numbered and do not bear the traditional arcana names, but instead are labelled "Renovacao-Neutralidade" and so on. Some are immediately recognisable as tarot arcana but others are a little more obscure.
3 June 2009
Evangelion is a major Japanese manga having been running for over a decade and now as an anime. Earlier this year they issued the Evangelion Tarot deck drawn on the characters in the series. The imagery has been conceived and created for this tarot project rather than merely been lifted out of their existing stock of images, as has been done with some other such promo decks.
3 June 2009
One of the most tedious stages in making up a tarot is lamination. One wishes one could dispense with this but it is essential if cards are to be handled. Sadly there is no automatic way of doing this available for the low volume user. Also is it not just a matter of pushing them through but one must keep focused and concentrated, otherwise the images can get creased, or waved, or bubbling appear under the laminate. One needs to constantly check the temperature and smooth the final four or so inches entering the machine to avoid waves and creasing. I have two lamination machines, and sit feeding them at the same time. Even so it takes ages to do 1000 sheets. It is so, so, so boring. After about a week I am halfway through laminating my latest tarot. Of course, I have to get on with all the other things I need to do at the same time so can't spend more than a few hours each day on this. I have also been working on a very detailed painting which has taken up a great deal of my time for the last three weeks.
1 June 2009The latest issue of the Tarosophist International edited by Marcus Katz is now available. It includes a review of the Art of Japanese Tarot exhibition. You can buy a copy from the Tarot Professionals website www.tarotprofessionals.com. This has a cover featuring Emily Carding's artwork for her Tarot of the Sidhe which I published a few years ago. The full 78 card deck is now to be published by Schiffer books. I still have a few copies remaining of my limited edition of the majors. I expect this will now become quite collectable. You can see copies here.
28 May 2009
In the last few days I have begun work on printing and laminating the next tarot in my series. This is the amazing esoteric and art tarot Ithell Colquhoun created in 1977 when she was 71 years old and about ten years before she died. This is the first 78 card deck I have ever done, and judging by the amount of time it will take to produce, probably the last. It requires four times the number of hours I have to invest in making a majors only tarot. I am going to do the work in two batches of 50 decks, to cut the amount of time. Even so, the lamination and cutting of 50 decks will, I expect, take over two solid weeks of work. I was very lucky to have been in touch with Ithell Colquhoun back in the early 80s when she contributed a couple of articles to my Hermetic Journal magazine. Producing her Taro is a kind of tribute to this amazing surrealist artist, writer and esotericist. Sadly, I expect sales to be slow. No one seems to be as excited about this publication as am I and the editor Richard Shillitoe. I suspect, however, in five or six years time, when the edition is sold out, I will get moaning letters from people wanting copies. People always seem to leave it to the last minute when buying limited editions, as I find with the books I produce.
27 May 2009
Robert Place has produced a number of well known tarots - The Alchemical Tarot, The Tarot of the Saints, The Angels Tarot, and The Buddha Tarot. Now he has issued the Annotated Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery. This is in the form of 22 large 'cards' 8.5 by 5.5 inches (216 by 140 mm), intended more for instruction than divination. The inspiration for the designs was the Pre-Raphaelite painter Burne-Jones. Each of the Major arcana is symbolically explored through a focus on the seven classical planets, and the various symbolic components of the design are labelled with their esoteric meaning and significance.
26 May 2009
Today I received a Japanese magazine containing a rather fine furoku or gift tarot entitled The Particle Tarot. This was produced by Ryuichi Izumi with the artwork by Ken Kumagai. The tarot is printed on thickish card bound into the magazine and one has to cut these out. The designs are rather interesting using a dominant black outline with strong colouring.
25 May 2009
I just bought a copy of the Motherwell Tarot created by Canadian psychic Dickie Motherwell. The designs for this full 78 card deck are quite simple. They are perhaps designed especially to help the reader as they have keywords on the four sides of the card face.
20 May 2009
Beth Seilonen never ceases to amaze us with her creative invention. I try to keep up with her output. She never tires of exploring new ways to work with tarot imagery. Recently I bought her Fishy Tarot, which is a 78 card, fully emblematic deck. Here the suits are Hooks, Masts, Pearls and Shells. As always, Beth brings her subtle and gentle humour to her designs. This one I will place in the Beth Seilonen drawer of my tarot collection, alongside her Isabel Snail, Frog and Sun Conure Tarots. Every tarot collector should try and buy some of her decks. They are usually limited to a small number. I have just bought two of her new issues, and will present them on this weblog over the next few weeks.
18 May 2009
Chialing Huang, from whom I bought the The Destiny Light Tarot, tells me that its creator, Max, loves photography and 2D/3D drawing. Photography is the foundation of and inspiration for his creative work. So it seems likely that this deck was created using a computer graphics program.
15 May 2009
Hopefully, now my tarot exhibition is over, it will be back to business as usual on this weblog. I have a batch of new items from the Far East to being to your attention. First is a new item from Taiwan, The Destiny Light Tarot, 2009. Like many Taiwanese and Chinese tarots this comes in a big box, here with a heavy book and a notebook. It is a 78 card deck with fully illustrated minors. The artwork is derived from photographs. They look like paintings but I am not entirely sure if they were not made using a graphics program. I can almost see the brushwork in places, but that can sometimes be mimiced. In any case the images are sometimes quite startling and original.
11 May 2009Sadly, I have not been able to find much time over the last few weeks to write up my tarot weblog. I will try and enter some of my new acquisitions onto these pages over the next few days.
I have now finished one of the spin offs from the exhibition a video. This DVD format video was created to be a record of my exhibition at the Glasgow School of Art in April 2009. Curated by Ronnie Heeps and Adam McLean, this exhibition in the Rene Mackintosh Gallery was drawn from my collection of original cards and documents the evolution of tarot art in Japan and simultaneously opens a window onto Japanese popular art and its contemporary culture. This professional quality 18 minute video documentary was filmed and edited by Pat Smith. It is written and presented by myself. It gives a good overview of the exhibition and I give a commentary on many of the exhibits. You can buy a copy here.
The exhibition now moves to another venue, the new exhibtion space at Kilbirnie Library in North Ayrshire. It will open there in June.
27 April 2009
Last Friday and during part of this week I am working on a video of the Art of Japanese Tarot exhibition. This provides a walk through of the exhibits with a commentary by myself, a piece by Ronnie Heeps and some material shot on the opening night. The response to the exhibition has been very positive. Its situation within the Glasgow School of Art, means that it is primarily reaching an audience interested in the artwork.
21 April 2009
The Art of Japanese Tarot exhibition opened on Friday evening. There was a good attendance and the event seemed to go off well. The audience for the opening was primarily composed of people from the art world, but there was also a modest group of tarot enthusiasts. The event, in the prestigious Mackintosh Gallery of the Glasgow School of Art, was opened by the Director and the Japanese Deputy consul, who attended with one of his colleagues. The audience was then subjected to a mercifully short introduction from myself.
These photographs were kindly supplied to me by Marcus Katz.
This is one of the first general tarot exhibitions to be held within an art gallery. There have been many exhibitions of the tarot paintings or prints of an individual artist, but as far as I know almost none presenting the whoile tarot phenomenon as the subject for an exhibition.
The exhibition catalogue is now available. You can buy copies here.
7 April 2009
After much work, finally the catalogue for the Art of Japanese Tarot exhibition is finished. I have printed and bound up two proof copies, one for me and the other for the designer and curator, Ronnie Heeps, so we can make sure that no mistakes remain. Once everything is checked yet again, I will begin printing copies which will go on sale at the opening. I will also sell some copies through the Art Tarot website.
27 March 2009
Today I obtained a copy of the Cocktail de Tarot. I have had some scans of this for some time but I was pleased to get the original cards. Scans hardly do justice to tarot images. Now I can see all the detailed texturing of the sculptural clothes which the figures wear. The imagery was created in 2000 by the Japanese artist Shemay (or Shimmei) using a computer graphics program. It is computer collage using photographs for human faces, and ray traced and rendered forms for the clothes and various objects appearing in the card designs.
26 March 2009
Today a big envelope arrived from the Post Office announcing their latest price increases. These are quite high at about 8%, so I will have to start thinking about revising my prices, otherwise I will find these new postal costs erode my income from the sales. I have adopted a policy of including the postage costs in the price of the tarots I sell. I now wonder if this is a correct strategy and that I should perhaps quote a price for the tarot deck then the costs of the postage. The real postage costs, of course, include the not inconsiderable cost of the packaging and the fee I have to pay to have the Post Office to uplift mail from my address every day, as well as the actual stamps. This would have effect of making people aware of the true costs involved and appear to reduce the price of my tarots. I think most people expect to see the cost of postage when they buy items. When I sell a tarot for 40 pounds then up to 5 pounds can be the post and packing charges. When I have the time I will begin moving over to this new way of working. So, when you see the prices of my tarot decks fall, then please remember there is postage on top of that ! You will still be paying approximately the same amount.
I have already implemented this for the Diary of a Broken Soul and will gradually apply this to the other items as I get the time.
26 March 2009 The last few days I have devoted mostly to tarot. An exciting project has arisen through the discovery of the Taro deck created by the writer, Surrealist artist, celticist and occultist, Ithell Colquhoun (1906-88). This was created in 1977 but only recently uncovered amongst her possessions. The artwork is abstract and consists of a full set of 78 cards, Major and Minor arcana. These are renamed to reflect the influence of the Order of the Golden Dawn. The images were glued onto a white paper which has rather faded in the last decades so I have had to make a lot of careful adjustments and hand corrections to this, which is very time consuming. When I eventually complete this I will set it up for printing, though will probably not be able to do this till after my exhibition in April. This deck will be a real treasure and very collectable. Today I am also spending time on the final proofreading of the catalogue for the exhibition. It is looking good but just needs a few corrections to make it perfect.
23 March 2009
20 March 2009 Having published tarot cards for three years, I am only too aware of the problems of producing and selling tarot, which have been additionally impacted by the recent uncertainties in the global financial situation. Understandably, people cut back on their spending and for many potential customers, purchasing a set of art tarot cards is something they can dispense with or delay to the distant future. In recent months my sales, though always slow, have dropped to a mere trickle of orders, so it has become necessary for me now to reassess my tarot publishing business.
My eighteen publications to date have been custom produced to fit the artist's requirements. This means custom sizes, custom boxes, and a great number of my man hours spent producing the decks. This results in my having to set a high price for the decks. It has become obvious to me that I had to try and find a less costly way of producing tarots, which would enable me to reduce the price of the decks.
I have now found a printer able to undertake small batch production without loading up the costs. This does mean I have to work within a fixed standard format. There remained the problem of boxes. The custom made boxes I use at present are very expensive, and there is an additional cost in terms of time in fixing an image to the top of the box. I have found a solution in the form of a rigid transparent plastic lidded box. This would mean that I did not have to attach an image as the title card on the pile would show through. These are rather attractive and I will use some of these boxes for storing tarot cards from my own collection which were not supplied in boxes. There are some other costs I can avoid if I myself, as publisher, sign the limited edition cards, rather than sending them off to the artist for signature. I would plan to issue these in smaller editions of 50 copies and unfortunately this means paying the artist a much reduced fee. The end result, however, would be professionally printed tarots in smaller editions at around half the price of my existing publications, which will be very collectable as they should sell out within the much shorter time span of a few months.
I will, of course, be able to continue my original custom made cards for those designs which cannot fit into the standard card format.
Unfortunately, as there seems to be almost no one, apart from myself, enthusiastic enough about modern tarot art to be willing to invest their own money in the production, I have been forced to consider shifting away from a custom solution fitted to the individual designs to this more practical and less expensive (both in time and money) production method. It will give me the opportunity of offering artists the possibility of having their work published in a small edition and realising this in a relatively short time span. It should get a number of designs into print form and augment the collections of the few serious collectors of tarot. There are so many wonderfuly tarot card designs out there that should be made available in a printed form. Sadly, most of the artists themselves cannot manage to do this, so their work is occluded and invisible. I hope my publishing project will be able to get some of these into printed form.
19 March 2009 In the last few days I have received the imagery for Ly Narciso's latest tarot which I intend to publish as the next in my series. There is quite a bit of work to do on this and my ongoing work on my forthcoming tarot exhibition will, no doubt, preclude me being able to work further on this till after the exhibition closes, however, it looks like a wonderfully stylised tarot.
18 March 2009 I recently managed to purchase a complete set of the Mahotarot. This is based on Mahoraba, a manga series by Akira Kojima, which was later adapted into an anime. The cards, bearing the characters of Mahoraba placed in a tarot format, were individually issued with the Gangan Wing comic books, from 2004 to 2006. They were never issued as a complete set, so it is apparently rather difficult to acquire a full set. Luckily, I now have one.
17 March 2009 The rather attractive Tarot de Tours, by the French painter and sculptor, Sylvian Badina, arrived today. It is rather minimalist, reducing the figures to simple forms, while also using a restricted muted palette of greens and browns. The cards are, for the most part, renamed, but the imagery is classic tarot. Needless to say, the artist lives in Tours.
10 March 2009 Tarot collecting is often a serious business, but sometimes it has its amusing moments. Some years ago I saw for sale some beer glasses made for Pete's Brewing Company of Palo Alto in California. I decided not to buy them, but a few days ago I found instead four beer mats (or do they call them 'coasters' in the USA). I managed to buy all four for a few Euros. Pete's Wicked Ale seems to have adopted four tarot cards as emblems for their beer. The mats I now have are, I am glad to say, unstained with the usual rings left by beer glasses.
9 March 2009 One of the readers of this weblog has kindly let me know that the tarot I mentioned earlier is a French version of the Truth Seeker's Tarot by David Fontana, issued in 2008.
9 March 2009 Today I received a rather fine French tarot. This was sold to me as a Tarot of Marseilles but it does instead follow the Rider Waite pattern, though the pips do not use the emblem forms from the Waite deck. The colours are rather vibrant and are beautifully heightened with gold foil. The title artist and date of publication are entirely unknown to me. A delightful mystery deck. Perhaps someone who reads the weblog will enlighten me as to its title.
4 March 2009 I have made some progress on creating the exhibits for the forthcoming exhibition. I am using large frames (50 by 70 cms) in which I can show examples of cards from decks on related themes. There will be about 30 of these together with a number of glass cases, within which tarots in books and layouts of full decks can be placed. Setting these up is exacting work and will take probably up much of March as I always have so many things to do, binding books, sending out packets, trying to squeeze in some painting time, researching alchemical works, studying emblems and paintings and of course looking for new tarots to collect.
28 February 2009 There are not that many self-published Japanese tarots, but another one fell into my hands recently. This is the Ninja Boy Tarot published in 2008. The imagery is rather cute and keeps close to the established tarot archetypes. Here are the Fool, the Tower and the Sun. I am not sure if it is based on a particular version of the computer game or some manga based on it.
25 February 2009 Today I picked up from the Post Office a packet containing an Italian tarot in a rather naive style of artwork, the Tarocchi Carlotta, issued in an edition of 100 copies. This seems to be based on the Oswald With designs. The 22 Majors have been painted in watercolours by the clairvoyant and tarot reader Carlotta.
24 February 2009 There is a growing body of Korean tarots. Many of these are directed towards a younger audience. The Tarot Card Diary is such a production, consisting of an illustrated diary together with a set of 22 tarot cards. The images are rather sweet. I liked the image of the Hermit in his glass jar, complete with a light bulb. Death is nicely represented as a checkmate, while the Sun has a sunflower.
23 February 2009 I have now acquired a copy of the Tarocchi Buddhisti, issued in 1995 in Turin by the Libreria Editrice Psiche. This was created by three people, Sandra Parolin, Paravarto Viglierco and Gianpaolo Fiorentini. It is not a standard tarot, as it has 33 cards and though some cards echo the image of the Tarot, others are entirely different in conception. The first 22 cards are emblematic, but the final group of 11 follow a different symbol structure. I am not entirely sure what is essentially Buddhistic about the imagery on the cards. It supposedly maps out the path of liberation in Buddhism, and the cards were not intended to be used for fortune telling but for exploring the path to enlightenment. Here are three of the cards which reflect tarot imagery.
20 February 2009 Last summer I got a small free gift tarot given away with An.An, a Japanese fashion oriented magazine for young people. I now have another gift tarot from An.An, this with the title The Tarot for Better Fortune. The images are what some young people might be tempted to call 'cool, but in a rather retro way.
13 February 2009 I have been working for the last three weeks almost exclusively on the catalogue/book to go with my Art of Japanese Tarot Exhibition. Thankfully, now most of this is now completed. It is extremly difficult for a non Japanese speaker to research this material, and even to identify the artist/illustrators. I do have many rather obscure Japanese tarots that one just cannot locate any information about. Working on this exhibition has been very useful for me, as I have been able to appreciate in depth the amazing breadth and quality of the artwork to be found in Japanese tarot. Even giveaway decks in magazines can exhibit great skill and original thought on the part of the artist. By early next week the catalogue will be in the hands of the designer and I will have to start making up the exhibits - a considerable task as sample cards from many decks have to be mounted in frames, which could take up much of March. This project has been about as large a one as I can undertake without substantial help. It has absorbed hundreds of hours of my (unpaid) time). I hope it will make some impact on the art world and enable art historians to look at tarot as a vehicle for art, and also to see tarot art as documenting the social history of our era. Of course, an exhibition is a fleeting ephemeral thing, and will rapidly fade from view, but I will be left with the catalogue. I know many people in the tarot community see me as an outsider to tarot, as I have no interest in divination, and I don't expect this exhibition will endear me to them, but I do want to make it known that tarot is not just a fortune telling game with cards, but a vehicle and medium for art.
3 February 2009 I recently obtained another cat tarot, the Mystical Cat Tarot by Debra Klopp-Kersey. This is a limited edition of 100 copies using Debra's paintings. In a year she has produced three tarots the Crow Tarot, the Clown Tarot and now her new cat tarot. She is a prolific artist and creates dolls, sculptures as well as some rather wonderful surreal paintings as well as her tarots. People should check out her website at www.nannynortonprims.com if they want to see her artworks and buy one of her tarots.
2 February 2009 Over the last week or so I have been very gratified to have received sponsorship for my forthcoming exhibition on the Art of Japanese Tarot. In 2007 I had an exhibition on the theme of alchemy and during the preparation for this I received sponsorship from an american supporter which subsidised the cost of producing the book or catalogue. As I managed to sell a few items in the exhibition, overall I only made a small loss. With the tarot exhibition there is no possibility of selling items (apart from the catalogue), so it potentially could have cost me a considerable amount of money as well as all the time I have had to invest in this essentially educational project. So it was very heartening, last week, to be offered some funds to cover the costs of producing the catalogue/book that goes with the exhibition. One must do a catalogue, else the exhibition disappears entirely from the world the moment the pieces are taken down from the walls of the gallery. One of the other main costs was that of framing the exhibits. One must use quality frames for an exhibition in a major gallery such as that of the Glasgow School of Art. This amounted to about £800 ($1200). In the last few days two individuals have come forward to help with this.
I have been working most of last week writing the catalogue and this should also take up much of this coming week. Then I will have to spend quite a few weeks making up the exhibits into frames. It will be a very worthwhile project as it is one of the first opportunities to present tarot as art within a gallery with substantial art historical credentials. It has long been my wish that people would see more to tarot than mere fortune telling, but that they would value it as an art format and see the evolution of its forms as reflecting society and thus documenting social history. Japanese tarot is a coherent body of material that wonderfully demonstrates this. One day, in the not too distant future, I hope some enlightened gallery might wish to commission me to create a travelling exhibition on Tarot as Art. Thie present more modest and focussed exhibition will be a good foundation for that.
28 January 2009
That part of my shelf space devoted to Chinese and Taiwanese tarots is crammed with lots of those big-box tarots. Anyone who buys these decks will know what I mean. A big strong solid box with a magnetic fastening flap, inside lined with a satin like material, containing a small paperback book and the deck of tarot. This one is entitled The Fantasy treasure tarot box and is a 78 card deck, with the familiar elongated format that the Chinese seem to prefer, based, no doubt, on their playing card tradition. This present tarot, like a number of others I have, presents fantasy artworks on tarot cards. It is a compilation from different artists. These artists do not seem to be credited. The pips do not have any emblematic artwork. The choice of images for the Majors is quite apt.
27 January 2009 Today I made some progress with writing the catalogue/book for my forthcoming exhibition on the Art of Japanese Tarot. As always, I like to get thing done well in advance of the event as one never knows what can turn up at the last moment to divert one. It is quite exciting to see the exhibition beginning to take shape. I have had a clear idea of what I would do from the inception, but it is very gratifying to work through the details.
26 January 2009 I had a little website drama over the last two days. My Tarot Collectors Forum www.tarotcollectors.com suddenly went offline on Sunday. Although I operate the system, the forum is physically sited in the USA, so I had no direct control over the situation. Eventually the engineers did whatever was necessary to get my site (and the hundreds of others hosted on their system) up and running again after a 24 hour loss of service - not too painful. Luckily all the information, the members logins and passwords, the archives of postings and images, was preserved intact.
26 January 2009 The Fifth Tarot is a new age syncretic deck that seems to meld together various earth religions, and introduces a new suit to the standard tarot, the fifth element or ether. Thus it has 92 cards (the standard 78 plus 14 for the suit of ether). The production is excellent for a self-published deck, being similar to the output of a publisher such as Llewellyn. It comes in a box with a 336 page book. The large cards are well printed with a glossy protective varnish. Thus they feel like any other professionally produced deck. The pip cards are emblematic, but with no relationship to the standard Rider-Waite imagery. Some the Majors are renamed, as are the suits (Fire, Feathers, Shells, Stones and Lotus).
25 January 2009 Thanks to the help of a fellow tarot collector, I managed to obtain a copy of a new tarot published in Japan in 2008. This is the Original Tarot of Kiyoshi Matsumara. Although this is published by a Japanese company named 'Oregon Farm', they seem unwilling to sell this outside Japan, thus I had to call on the help of a fellow collector with contacts in Japan. This is a full Majors and Minors deck, with an additional four Majors, numbers 22 to 25, bearing the rather obscure titles 'Reorganisation', 'Traffic', 'Endless' and 'Lock'. The Minors are emblematic, though only a few cards follow the well known Rider-Waite imagery. The artwork style created within a computer graphics program, but the artist seems to have purposively adopted a retro look, harking back to 1980s computer graphic art with its 'jaggy lines' with stepping, and the use of solid saturated block colours.
23 January 2009 Comics Fans, is a Hong Kong based magazine aimed at girls, published by Jonesky Publishing Limited. I have acquired a rather nice promo tarot issued in 2008 with Comic Fans. The imagery is rather amusing. I must say I rather enjoyed the Tower as a layered cake and the Moon card is also a bit of a hoot.
21 January 2009 The countries of South America have produced a number of interesting tarots, though these are difficult to source and obtain. Today I have in my hands the Oraculo de los Orichas by Nancy Silvia Mascialino, apparently self-published in 2007 in Argentina. Despite its title, this is a genuine tarot, with the Majors printed in a terracotta colour with the Minors in black ink. Each minor has a drawing in white on a black background, which looks like scraperboard, but could well have been done in some medium imitating this. The imagery of the Majors is quite original, though influenced by the indigenous art of the Pre-Columbian period.
20 January 2009 There must surely always room in ones collection for another cat tarot. I must have about 20 or more - one day I must count them. In the last few days I have acquired two more. One is a Cat Tarot from Taiwan, created by Tia, accompanying a book by Alice Chen. This is a 78 card deck which comes as a series of press-out printed cards packaged with the book. It is a Rider Waite clone, nicely drawn and painted. For the most part the cats are anthropomorphised, but with a few in their natural form.
18 January 2009 Tarots can be among the most obscure of artworks. One can usually find information on the internet about any, even a quite poor, novel or piece of music, but some tarot creations remain intractable and almost invisible. I recently bought a rather beautiful art tarot, which I assume was self-published by the artist, entitled the Poetry Attitude Tarot, created in 2008 by Jack Chang in Taiwan. The artwork has some simple line-drawings (seemingly using a brush) with some strong unmixed watercolour (or water based inks) applied in the background on wet paper so as to produce beautiful featherings. I found it rather delightful and immediately went to Google et al, to find out more about this deck and its creator. Zilch! So I have this rather wonderful deck, but know nothing about it.
16 January 2009 I recently obtained a rather obscure tarot produced in Germany. This is the Wendy Tarot, and is intended for children. The cards are small and almost square in shape. I am not sure of the exact origins of this deck, but it is produced by the Egmont Ehapa Verlag, and is possibly a deck given away as a gift with a magazine produced by this company. The artwork is not especially skilled or original, using photocollage and a computer graphics program to colour and modify the images. Some of the images seem familiar to me, though I cannot recall in which deck they could have appeared.
15 January 2009 Today I had a meeting with the designer and artist Ronnie Heeps and the Glasgow School of Art to finalise the schedule for my forthcoming exhibition The Art of Japanese Tarot. This will open on Friday the 17th of April and run for three weeks. This exhibition celebrates the diversity and creativity of the Japanese artists, graphic designers, writers and publishers who took hold of the European tarot structure and began to work with it in their own particular way. It is based on my own collection of over 160 tarots from Japan. Of course, few people, outside Central Scotland will be able to attend the exhibition, but I am going to publish a fully illustrated book based on the exhibition which will provide a comprehensive survey of Japanese tarot. I have some funding for printing this but it does not cover the full costs, thus I am looking for some additional funds. If anyone would like to be a sponsor and assist in funding the printing costs, please get in touch with me at adam@alchemywebsite.com A year and a half ago I mounted a similar exhibition on the theme of alchemy and issued a large format book. This will be in the same style.
13 January 2009 I just bought a copy of the Urban Tarot from an artist, Ryan Feddersen, going under the name TheWesternSky on Etsy. Well worth buying, but as they are hand made to order there are not always copies immediately available. She describes the cards in this way.This full 78 card deck with all original illustrations was created using traditional card interpretations with contemporary graphic symbolism. I worked hard to create a set of imagery which accurately communicates the traditional meanings but does so in a way that is aimed for us to connect to now - not 400 years ago. One of my favorite examples is the Chariot. The traditional interpretation reads "The Chariot is all about the concentration, willpower and determination it takes to control those (proverbial) horses and keep them steadily on the path that leads to your goals. The card stands for resolving conflict within yourself and finding the necessary balance to accomplish your ambitions." My chariot features the Cadillac. Owning a Cadillac has been the dream of many americans for decades. They've saved up, worked hard, and focused not only because they are beautiful well made cars, but because of what they represent. A cadillac shows that you have made it, it's a material manifestation of your success, the realization of your goals and fulfillment of ambition. If you don't understand any card right away, consult any website or book on tarot, and it will help you fully understand the symbolism I have chosen. I like Tarotpedia because they are crisp and clear, while being thorough. The deck features 78 cards with 26 original drawings. 22 for the Major Arcana and 4 for the suits of The Minor arcana, which are formated so that they can double easily as playing cards. They are all hand screen printed and painted, some cards, which are often my favorites, have a little extra character like interesting splotches or streaks from the spontaneity and intentionally random nature of my process, but all cards are easily readable. Every card and deck is completely unique.
2 January 2009 Anna Klaffinger has created a rather wonderful tarot. The artwork is very detailed and the figures so beautifully modelled and formed, that it must have taken her many hours on each card. She has produced a 78 card deck with the emblematic minors, based on the Rider Waite images, though rendered in her own style. So we get 78 pieces of delightful artwork for only a few Euros (the deck is professionally printed in Austria).
1 January 2009 I don't often buy original tarot works as usually these are well beyond my budget, but occasionally one comes before my view and I am able to buy it. A few days ago I received Laraine Atherton's collage deck in 'day of the dead' style. She produced this hand made collage deck back in 2004. The card background is sprayed with gold paint and each card has the same image of a skull set up on it and an engraved image of two dressed skeletons. This provides a coherent structure on which she collages the various images that relate to the meaning of the particular tarot card. Each card also has a naked or nearly naked pin-up, in classic 1920's style. The thick layers of the collage are then sealed in using pva glue. Many people are rather dismissive of collage, but I found this deck quite delightful and well made.
31 December 2008 I sometimes wonder if I am not the most obsessive of tarot collectors. Sometimes I get rather engaged by a particular deck and try hard to find a copy. Often these are not especially collectable, nor of great artistic merit and seem to have little perceptible value. One of these I have been looking for over the last few years is a deck issued free with the Spanish magazine Superpop. Now there is a well known Superpop tarot and it is relatively easy to find, but Superpop issued another deck El Gran Juego del Amor ('The Great Game of Love') which proved quite elusive. I finally managed to buy a copy from someone in Spain and it arrived today. It is one of those press-out tarots, printed on thickish card bound into the magazine - even the box is a press-out. It is surprising how decks like this, given away free in magazines, are so very difficult to find. I have many such from Japanese magazines, where they are called Furoku (gifts). Although at the moment these have little perceived value, as collectors tend to assign high prices to better known rare decks, such as the Greenwood, but I expect, in the years to come, as people expand their collecting vision, decks such as this from Superpop will acquire a more realistic value. The artwork, in watercolour, is bright, using large areas of colour.
23 December 2008 In my entry in this weblog for 25th May 2007 I showed some illustrations of tarot designs, Le Tarot d'Amour, by Christine Lesueur in a large format book published in 1985. Today I obtained a set of 22 postcards of Le Tarot d'Amour by Christine Lesueur also published 1985. Strangely, though in very similar style, the artwork is different for each format. The images in the book are dated June and July 1984. Here is the image for the Fool, on the left from the book and on the right the postcard version.
18 December 2008 After a bit of a hiatus, I have suddenly discovered, through my contacts, a number of new tarot publications. I have only bought a few items over the last month or so, but now, all of a sudden, I have about ten items on order. Unfortunately all are from outside the UK and the recent fall in the pound has meant that the costs have increased substantially for me. Still, I must keep my collection up to date. If you miss one of these small edition tarots, you are unlikely ever to see one again.
17 December 2008 A few days ago I experienced a bit of a computer disaster. The database I had painstakingly built of Japanese tarots, which was the main research resource for my forthcoming exhibition in April, became internally damaged. How this happened I don't know, but as the database stores the information in a complex file structure and not as simple readable text in a file, one can only access the information through the program. Unfortunately the internal damage meant that some records could not be accessed and as a result one could neither search the database nor edit it in any way (nor save changes) as the program just put up an error message saying "internal damage" when one tried to do this. After a few cups of tea to try and revive my fallen spirits, I came up with a rescue strategy. I managed to open a new blank database and ran it at the same time as the damaged one. I was then able to laboriously cut and paste the information into the new database. I was able to skip around the area which was damaged and so only lost a few records. It took most of yesterday to fix it and I now have access to the information and research again. It would have taken weeks to reassemble all the data.
12 December 2008 This week I have received a number of tarots. Amongst these is the Bifrost Tarot of Jeremy Lampkin. This is a full 78 card deck based on the imagery of the Thoth - Crowley - Frieda Harris Tarot. The title "Bifrost" refers to the Rainbow Bridge of Norse mythology, and indeed the rainbow makes an occasional appearance in some of the card images. The edition is limited to only 72 copies.
