Adam's Tarot WeblogEntries from 6th July 2010.
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.
Go to Archive 4 - entries from 12th December 2008 to 29th June 2010.
To contact Adam, email adam@alchemywebsite.com
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I often get asked whether I sell items shown here, or for information on how to obtain copies. I am sorry, but I do not sell items from my reference collection and in general I cannot assist people in obtaining copies of rare or obscure tarots. I am also unable to provide valuations of tarot decks.
3 Feb 2012
The delightfully named Useless Tarot produced by Poppen-Do in 2010 is another transparent tarot. The 'cards' are very small only 2 inches (50mm) high. For the most part they are collaged pieces from engravings. They are sold in a matchbox, which also contains a little white book, with some keywords. I can find out no further information about this humorous Japanese artist.
2 Feb 2012
The Kappa Sigure Tarot is a self-published deck from Japan by Gre (Kappa Sigure). The artwork is in pencil and ink with some airbrushed or spray pigment to texture some of the cards. You can see some of her other artwork through this page.
1 Feb 2012
I recently obtained a copy of the luxury edition of Ryuji Kagami's original tarot Astrology of Love. This came in a rather fine box and includes a faux leather pouch somewhat in the style of those issued by the Morinaga Hi-Crown Chocolate company in the 1990s. The artwork for this deck is by Aki Horiuchi who must have worked under the direction of Ryuji Kagami who has conceived and designed many interesting tarots over the last decades. This is a rather fine Rider Waite clone. The artwork appears to be in acrylics in a stylised naive format.
31 Jan 2012
A week or so ago I received a copy of Les Tarot des Femmes Erotiques composed from vintage early 20th century erotic photographs, choses to reflect tarot imagery. This is published in the USA by the witches beautyhistorymagic.com You can see rather full descriptions of their production at www.vintageeroticatarot.com Here are The cards corresponding to The Hierophant, The Moon and the Ten of Swords.
30 Jan 2012
I have now printed, laminated and made up the final 40 copies of the Ithell Colquhoun Taro and these are now on sale again. I do have a few advance orders so anyone wanting to buy a copy of this strange and creative tarot deck made by well known English surrealist painter and occultist, please place an order soon before the remainder are sold.
29 Jan 2012
The Tarot Card Alice book and deck issued in Korea in December 2011 uses the original illustrations of Tenniel to Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. These have been subtly and sensitively redrawn and coloured without overwhelming the underlying drawings. At first glance one would think the colouring was through watercolour, but on close inspection this appears to have been done digitally in watercolour style. I found this to be a rather fine production and a worthy new addition to my growing Korean section.
28 Jan 2012
I recently managed to obtain a copy (no 16) of the limited edition of 18 copies of the Rampo X Tarot created in pen and ink by the Japanese artist Sawsin Kondo. The artwork is quite astounding and I am pleased to have it in my collection.
12 Jan 2012
A few days ago I received El tarot de la Bruja Moderna. This Tarot of the modern witches is not that by Antonella Plantano and Laura Tuan issued by Lo Scarabeo, but an unidentified Spanish deck with entirely different graphics. There is no publisher, artist or date on the printed box. The slightly angular forms of the figures seems quite familiar to me, but I cannot remember if I have seen these before. The "witchcraft" element in the artwork is entirely minimal.
29 Dec 2011
The American Obscura Tarot by Misha Huntting takes a discordant and gothic perspective on american society and weaves this into a dark tarot deck. This is a full 78 card deck. You can buy a copy and see Misha's considerable body of artwork on her website at theartofmishahuntting.weebly.com
15 Dec 2011
Schiffer Books has issued a number of fine tarots in the last two years or so. Today I received the Secret Language of Birds Tarot. This was conceived by the writer Adele Nozedar and the artwork in the form of acrylic paintings was created by Linda Sutton. The full 78 card deck comes in a large box with a 200 page book describing and contextualising the deck. The cards are in a large format with minimal border which allows the art work to be seen in detail. The original paintings must be astounding as Linda Sutton has used gold leaf on many of them which she then overpaints. I expect she will make more money from selling her art work than from the royalties on the tarot deck. Some of her tarot painting were on exhibition at the Piers Feetham Gallery in London in September/October 2011 see www.piersfeethamgallery.com. They are not especially expensive so perhaps some tarot collectors might buy some of her pieces.
13 Dec 2011
Today a rather fine Rider-Waite clone from Romania arrived in the post. The artist has stuck closely to the original designs but redrawn these. This seems to have been done in a computer graphics program rather than using paint and paper. The outlines of forms are in a fine reddish brown line which reduces the contrast and thus softens the imagery. The style is thus light and fresh, contrasting with the coloured woodcut style of the originals.
8 Dec 2011I cannot be the only one who was astounded when seeing illustrations of some black and white images of Tarot designs in Decker and Dummett's History of the Occult Tarot. These designs were created by Wilfrid Pippett and J.B. Trinick around 1921-23 in collaboration with A.E. Waite. This may have been intended for use within Waite's Rosicrucian inspired order.
Shortly after the book was released, I tried to find the sources for these images, hoping to find a complete set and perhaps even issue it in my Art Tarot series. I was not successful in these endeavours.
So I was delighted to hear, earlier this year, that Marcus Katz had discovered almost a complete set of coloured images of these designs. Then his colleague Tali Goodwin managed to discover the original drawings and some prints based on these. Thus they now had a complete set of the designs over three formats.
Marcus and Tali have now published these in a large format book, Abiding in the Sanctuary: The Waite-Trinick Tarot. A Christian Mystical Tarot (1917-23). In this each of the pieces is reproduced full page, and they provide interpretative material as well as the historical background to the cards and their creators.
This book is available through Blurb.Com. The print quality is excellent. I see these images as one of the earliest of the art tarots. It is wonderful that a full set of the desgins has survived and that Katz and Goodwin have been able to make these available to us. The book can be bought from www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2702755 where you can see a preview.
28 Nov 2011
I have been very busy recently on my publications so have rather neglected my tarot weblog. However, tarots are still arriving and I hope to be able to catch up over the next few weeks. Among these is a rather fine large format book, not too expensive, with a delightful set of 78 tarot designs by Francesco Clemente. This was issued as part of his recent exhibition Francesco Clemente: The Tarot at the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy from September 9, 2011 to November 6, 2011. The images are essentially portraits of his friends in New York who include Salman Rushdie, Jasper Johns, Kiki Smith, Philip Glass and Scarlett Johansson. You can see some details on this page.
7 Nov 2011
Tarot collectors are usually a bit obsessive, but I suspect only the true hardcore collectors will be driven to buy a copy of the Melthelm Abstract Tarot. This is a self-published tarot from Japan, by an artist working in an abstract art mode. Tarot is, of course, an emblematic form and though a number of tarot artists have tried to push far into abstraction, for the most part they retain some emblematic content. Thus Wifried Teschler's Energetic Tarot of 1986, with its minimalist abstract forms, still seems to present a narrative, or at least one fnds oneself drawn to reading this into the artwork. The Taro of Ithell Colquhoun, though abstract, has a underlying esoteric system, which once grasped, enables one to see her images as refecting particular tarot archetypes. The Melthelm Abstract Tarot is totally uncompromising. One struggles to find any link of the artwork into the conventional tarot imagery. One might expect to find, say with the Lovers card, some division into two areas reflecting the two lovers, but this is not what we find. This tarot seems entirely opaque. It will be well worth collecting, as it is such an obscure item. I would expect that only a few copies will be sold and the artist will cease publishing them quite quickly. So it is likely that they will become very rare and unobtainable. The dealer Baby Dream has a small batch of these for sale.
1 Nov 2011
I have recently obtained from Japan the rather strangely named tarot deck Tiger Card Ultora : Fate/Tiger colosseum UPPER. Decoding this was not too difficult, courtesy of Wikipedia. Fate/Tiger colosseum UPPER is a 3D fighting game for one of the Playstation game machines. It was released in 2008. The tarot, which appears to be an official release, came with a printed set of rules for a card game, a folder for displaying the cards and a folding out stand up display figure. The artwork is very fine quality manga, and the delightful Moon card especially entranced me.
27 Oct 2011
Beth Seilonen is the most prolific creator of published tarots. She deserves a place in the Guinness Book of Records. I have most of her limited edition tarots in my collection, but I seem to have missed her Winter and the Crow tarot which she produced in January of this year. So I was delighted to be able to buy one of the few remaining copies. For this tarot she uses the medium of coloured pencil on a woven textured paper. The Crow makes its appearance of a number of tarots - Crow Tarot (Debra Klopp-Kersey) and Crow's Magick Tarot (Londa Marks) come immediately to mind.
Beth has just had one of her tarots Tarot Leaves published by Schiffer Books which will be easy available through the usual distributors.
26 Oct 2011
The Tarot of the Holy Light by Christine Payne-Towler and Michael Dowers draws on alchemical and other emblematic material found in woodcuts and engravings in early books on alchemy and mystical matters. These have been redrawn, coloured and collaged using Photoshop to create the imagery for each of the cards. I found it really interesting to identify the source of all the components, however, one does not need to be familiar with the original source material to appreciate their intriguing and delightful artwork. I loved the Tower with its use of an alchemical furnace from one of the alchemical engravings in the well known Mutus Liber. The artwork could be seen as being similar to that of Robert Place's Alchemical Tarot though he redraws the images in a lean modern style while Christine Payne-Towler and Michael Dowers create a more dense gathering of symbolism into each card image. It is certainly a deck that will fascinate and intrigue the viewer. It is issued in a fine solid box. You can buy copies from this website www.tarotuniversity.com/2011/09/tarot-of-the-holy-light-deck.html though I expect if will be widely distributed and sold through many outlets.
25 Oct 2011
The Quel Tarot by Kelley Kolberg has recently been issued. This is a 22 card Majors only deck in an edition limited to 100 copies. It comes in a rather fine wooden box. I understand that the creator is currently working on a full set of minors, so we might expect a full 78 card deck eventually to appear. The artwork uses photographs which have been modified in a computer graphics program to produce impressionistic effects. You can buy copies from Kelley Kolberg's web site www.metarotiscapes.net/Quel/Quel.html where you can see some more cards and some details about the deck.
13 Oct 2011
I often collect tarot cards issued with magazines. I find these especially interesting because they often reflect trends in culture rather than pure tarot concerns. Also these tarots, being given away for free, are often thrown away and consequently difficult to source even a few months after the magazine was issued. I recently bought Das Entscheidungstarot (Decision tarot) issued by the German fashion magazine Amica. The packaging records the illustrator as Roya, but does not indicate a date for the issuing of the tarot.
2 Oct 2011
A few days ago I obtained a copy of the Eroteme fashion tarot cards created by Oleg Mitrofanov. This is conceived of as biannual publication of a tarot deck, which "aims to expand the borders of fashion by introducing style, beauty and decadence into specific and often forgotten branches of cretative arts". This first issue uses the theme of opera. Each of the photographs of models posing in wonderful costumes, often with stage like makeup, are collaged with other graphic elements to present a tableaux related to a scene from a classic opera which in turn reflects the tarot imagery. It is quite a tour de force. This is a tarot which all serious collectors should try to acquire. It is not inexpensive, but the edition is very small (30 copies) and as the cards will be collected also by people in the fashion industry it will probably sell out quite rapidly. You can see more of the cards on www.olegmitrofanov.com from where you can buy them direct.
13 Sep 2011
Tarot 90 is a collective tarot produced by 22 separate artists for an exhibition organised by the Galleria Benot in Cadiz and the Galeria Akelarre in Marbella. The exhibition seems to have been designed by Juan Candon. I am not sure about the date on the exhibition which issued this tarot. The group of artists is known as Colectivo de Arte 90 whch seems to have been established in 1990. A number of the artworks are signed and dated '2000' and it may be the exhibition was in 2001. The artwork adheres closely to the tarot archetypes.
2 Sep 2011
The grim reaper is a familiar image for the Death card in tarot decks. Now Beth Seilonen, has created an entire Major Arcana using this idea, Grimmy's Transitional Arcana. As always Beth Seilonen, generously for us collectors, limits her edition to only 20 copies. I was able to buy number 7. As always Beth's subtle humour lies behind the images. Beth must be the most prolific published tarot artist of all time with nearly 60 titles. F.J Campos has also created many deck designs, but, sadly, almost none have been published.
31 Aug 2011
The Tarot de Madrid was produced in 1984. It consists of a series of photographs primarily of the heads of various models, whose faces have been painted to suggest the tarot arcana. It is a neat idea and well realised.
30 Aug 2011
The iTongo book and deck was created by Robyn-Anne Pollard of Cape Town in South Africa. The Major Arcana are based on South African mythology and legends, while the Minor Arcana present tableaux of tribal history spanning the period (c.1700 - 1850). The artwork was created by Chantal Fielding who works in oils as well as acrylics. You can buy a copy through www.africantarot.com There is a video on Youtube, just search for iTongo.
25 Aug 2011
Here is a bit of amusement with a sting in its tail. Today I received an email from someone wanting me to value
a tarot deck for them. Now I don't provide valuations. You can see I even put a note about that at
the head of this weblog. This is for a number of reasons. Firstly, I am not a professional
valuer. If I were a tarot dealer selling secondhand tarot decks, then I would have this expertise,
but I am not. Secondly, it is not possible to value decks unseen. Condition is important. Thirdly,
I don't know for what purpose such a valuation would be used. Someone might want use what I say
to push up an auction price. As I am quite well known in the tarot collecting community, someone
could well use what I say for their own purposes. I would have no control over how this person chose
to use any valuation I gave. So I don't give valuations !
So I wrote back to this person saying "Sorry I cannot provide valuations. This depends so much
on a correct identification of the edition and its condition." This person immediately replied
"Hi Adam sorry to be a pain, here are a couple of pics, trying to find anything about Tarot Cards
is so hard as most dealers go ohh Tarot Cards, it seams they can talk about the every day
playing card but Tarot ohh. If I'm asking to much, Thank you for your time,
I was quite surprised that this person did not seem to take no for an answer so to make the
situation crystal clear I replied "To reiterate. I do not give valuations."
To this I received this amusing though rather annoying message :
"What a drip To reiterate what a drip thanks 4 ur help, I will make sure I dont have a nice helpfulI often receive such unpleasant mails from people. I am sure this applies to many others who
word to say about a person that has the knowlage but not willing to part with it and is in the
public domain ie www, not a good advertising realy, all I asked for was advive that would have
taken the same amount of time and letters in a email, and less thought, I pray that in a life time,
u would ask me for advice, I would part with my knowlage to improve some1's day, you must be
so great. regards *******
P.S. Be more concerned about ur character than ur reputation....
b'coz ur character is who u are
and ur reputation is what other think of u..."
work publicly on the Internet. I have a thick skin and, indeed, found this missive rather amusing
which is why I decided to share it on my weblog. Their P.S. is especially amusing as it is self-referential.
Anyone writing such an email is obviously revealing a little bit too much of their character.
But there is a serious side to this. People, such as myself, who give their time to trying to promote
interest in some subject, do not deserve to be treated like this. A sensitive, caring individual, without
a carapace hardened by years of dealing with difficult individuals, might well just be driven to abandon
sharing their information by means of their website and all of us would be the losers. People who are so
selfish and unthinking as to write such a response in reply to a straightforward email, diminish and may
ultimately destroy Internet communication. Why should I bother even to reply to people who write to me
requesting my assistance, if I may have to face reading an unpleasant insulting reply such as this?
24 Aug 2011
Yesterday I received the Raven's Fool Tarot. I bought the special edition limited to 22 decks (I have number 17). This came with a beautiful pine box on the top of which the artist, Vicky DeFrancesco, has painted the image of a Raven. The full 78 card deck of almost square cards has some delightful artwork exploring the theme of the Raven. You can buy a copy direct from the artist at www.ravensfool.com
Over the last few weeks I have received a number of wonderful tarots, but have not managed to find the time to update this weblog, having been working on improving the layout and navigation of my interlocked series of web sites as well as on my publishing activities. Among these tarots I now have the Year of the Rabbit Tarot from Taiwan, a self-published deck limited to 300 copies. There are a number of Rabbit tarots, I can immediately recall three, the Twilight Rabbit Tarot, the Usatarot from Japan and Nakisha's Rabbit Tarot. This year, 2011, is the year of the Rabbit in the Chinese astrological calendar. I think you will agree that the art work for the Year of the Rabbit tarot is really neat.
2 Aug 2011
The Surrealist Tarot by Ari Bach is a wonderful series of 78 pencil drawings created over the summer of 2010. This full deck is published by Tarotsmith Divination and is available at a modest price through their web site surrealist.tarotsmith.net. The cards are quite small and I hope that Ari Bach might be persuaded to make some of his drawings available at a larger size so we can appreciate his graphic skills. I see he has some of his other material on DeviantArt. As with most surreal stylised tarots, there is a playful aspect to the imagery, a typical example of this toying with ideas and images being seen in the Eight of Cups.
1 Aug 2011
Afew years ago I managed to buy a copy of The Sinister Tarot by Christos Beest. This was an edition limited to 40 copies issued by the O.N.A. (Order of the Nine Angles) magical order and published in 2007. This was a deck of 20 cards with a clear tarot structure. Although not a secret, I eventually discovered that the creator of this deck was a talented musician and painter from the UK named Richard Moult. Now in collaboration with the Black Glyph Society, apparently located in Australia, he has augmented hs deck by adding the courts and other cards to produce the Emanations deck of 64 cards. I show three cards. The first was in the original Sinister Tarot, the other two were added in the Emanations.
27 July 2011
Fournier in Spain has issued the Alchemy TM1977 England Tarot. This is a full 78 card deck and uses the artwork developed by the Alchemy Gothic company in the UK which produces goth and steampunk fashion accessories, posters etc. Some of the Major arcana artwork uses that produced as posters. The image for the Hierophant is well known as is that for The World (their current Versus Doctrinus poster).
21 July 2011
Pat Smith, who created the video of my Art of Japanese Tarot has now been able to upload the full length version to YouTube. Youtube used to restrict videos in size and length.
13 July 2011
The third penguin themed deck I now have is the Penguin Parade Tarot by Robyn Tisch Hollister. This was issued in an edition of 50 copies. These are small cards which come in an interesting folding box. It is a full 78 card deck. The suits are Shells, Stones, Feathers and Sticks. The original artwork would appear to be in watercolour.
12 July 2011
I only rarely buy a "Tarot" deck which has no discernable tarot structure. I am rather conservative in my collecting habits and I keep my collection tightly focussed on decks with the familiar 22 majors and minors. If I were to add non tarot "oracles" I fear there would be no clear boundary to collecting. Very occasionally I make an exception, either because the artwork is important or the concept is significant in some way. I recently was drawn to purchase the Jung Tarot issued as a gift in the Japanese Misty magazine, No 6 , June 2011. The concept is by the prolific conceptualiser of tarot Ryuji Kagami with the artwork by Maggie Hyde. There are 22 cards but they do not seem to relate directly to the tarot archetypes - instead the imagery reflects Jungian ideas - Inner Shadow, Outer Shadow, Dark Anima, Light Anima, Self, Synchronicity, and so on. A nice idea, not tarot but still worth a place in my collection.
11 July 2011
The Dark Tantra Tarot has just been issued in the UK as an edition of 50 copies. The artwork is by Ruth Ramsden in collaboration with Mark Ramsden and is a synthesis of eroticism, fetishism and tantric spirituality. The pen drawings which are the basis of the designs were printed in two colours, dense black with thick lines and grey thin lines, whch gives a very interesting effect. You can see more details on their web site The limited edition Major arcana of 22 cards have four extra "Mistress" cards, presumably from a proposed Minor arcana.
9 July 2011
Are penguins the new cats? Well I now have three tarot decks on a penguin theme. They have a bit to go to catch up with their feline friends but they are moving in the right direction, along with rabbits, frogs and foxes.
The latest Penguin Tarot is Japanese in origin. I believe it was created in 2010. I am not sure penguins in clothes work that well.
8 July 2011
A few years ago Bethalynne Bajema produced the delightful Sepia Stains tarot. She has now issued another wonderfully stylish deck, the Black Ibis Tarot. The designs begin with posed photographs which are modified in Photoshop or some similar computer graphics program building up a complex of textured layers. Each has a clear foreground figure set against a distant backdrop, often of gothic buildings. The backgrounds are desaturated and toned towards Bethalynne's preferred sepia. The figures are given a further gothic feel through the style of their headpieces. These are well worth collecting along with the Sepia Stains, and you can buy copies through her website. You can also see some of her remarkable artwork on www.ettadiem.com
6 July 2011
The Tarot Medytacyjny - Poznaj Siebie (Get to know yourself Tarot) is a new Polish deck from Dariusz Cecuda, the creator of the Soul Mandala Tarot. This is a modified photographic tarot incorporating posed photographs, collaged images and the familiar layering of textures. It is a full 78 card deck with primarily unemblematic pip cards.
5 July 2011
I recently found a Czech tarot that I had not previously hear of. It is the Poselství Tarotu, published in Prague in 2004 and 2009, and is a full deck of 78 cards with emblematic pips. The designs are by Dagmar Lukuvková. The deck comes in a box with a substantial book by Renata Herber. I found the Tower card expecially engaging.
27 June 2011
Yet another cat themed tarot has appeared. This one is from Maria van Bruggen in Belgium. As with most cat tarots, this one is full of humour. You can see Maria's wide range of cat themed artwork on www.zazzle.com/cat_alogue
14 June 2011
The Hawaiian Aloha Tarot was, strangely, published in Japan this year, with a substantial descriptive book in Japanese. It is a full deck of 78 large cards. The artwork is in pen line coloured with watercolour. The artist is only identified by the name "Honey", though the artwork is signed "Ai". Some of the designs are original takes on the imagery. The minors are non standard. In the book each card is given a Hawaiian name - thus "Makani" wind, "Lomilomi" massage, "Kapa" Hawaiian cloth, "Humuhumunukunukuapua'a" the reef triggerfish (official fish of Hawaii), and so on. The deck comes in a strong cardboard box.
12 June 2011
I already have two tarots included as gifts in editions of the Spanish magazine Super Pop, so it was rather delightful to have the opportunity to buy another. This has some rather good quality artwork by A. Cortijos.
11 June 2011
I recently received a copy of a new version of the classic mid-18th century Nicolas Conver printing of the tarot of Marseilles. This has been skillfully redrawn and recoloured by Tadahiro Onuma of the ISIS organisation in Japan. The artwork adds modelling to the flat forms of the original, bringing the Conver up to date and yet preserving the style and forms of the original. It is a sensitive reworking, deeply respectful of the Tarot of Marseilles tradition. It should soon be available outside Japan.
6 June 2011
The Tarot Galego or Galician tarot was created by Manuel Aneiros and Xosé Vizoso (who created the artwork). Galicia is a province in Northwestern Spain, and it has its own distinctive language, related to Portuguese. The Tarot Galego was published at A Coruņa in 1992. The deck has 52 cards, the first 22 being the familiar major arcana, while 23-52 are a non-standard minor arcana not arranged in suits, but individually titled. The names are in Galician. This is a really interesting find. The figures are depicted in "peasant" style.
3 June 2011
A week ago I ordered a copy of the Tarocchi Politici from their distributor in Italy. It arrived in a massive box full of bulky packaging material. I searched for ages amongst the chopped up paper and eventually found a small box with the cards. This tarot was created in 2008 by F.G. Allenby as a series of pen drawings coloured with watercolours. Each card is a caricature of some Italian politician who is satirically placed in the tarot archetype. I am afraid I dont have sufficient knowledge of Italian politics in 2008, but I expect most Italians would immediately recognise the particular politician and the point of the satire. There are a number of satirical Italian tarots pointed at political and social aspects.
2 June 2011
I do have quite an extensive collection of cat themed tarots. I have now added to this perhaps the earliest cat tarot, produced in Japan in 1983. This is the Tarot Card for Lovers issued as a deck and book in the familiar slip case in which early Japanese tarots were published. The colours are very bright and the artwork is in pen line with coloured pencil. The images look so familiar to me that I suspect the artwork may have been reused or copied in some later tarot, but I just cannot recall which one.
1 June 2011
There are a number of tarots inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's invented magical book written by the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred. I just obtained the Tarot Necronómico issued with a book by J. Fernando Pérez-Vigo at Madrid in 1992.
31 May 2011
I still have a pile of tarots to bring to your attention through this weblog, but my time is limited by other commitements. I recently received the Tarocchi Futurismo created by Osvaldo Menegazzi. In this he celebrates the art movement of the early decades of the 20th Century, Italian Futurism, created by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. A number of artists were linked to this movement. Menegazzi draws on the paintings and graphics of Marinetti and Giacomo Balla with their bold and jarring shapes mixed with fragmented typography.
Here are two examples of Futurism
I have over forty Russian tarots so I was very pleased to receive another through the courtesy of a fellow tarot enthusiast in Moscow. This is the Tarot of the Twelve Rays by Isset Kotelnikova and Max Kim in 2010. It is a full 78 card deck with standard pip cards without emblems, and quite conventional Court cards. The artwork for the Majors is rather well done, with some interesting colour and light effects, and appear to be digitally realised rather than painted with pigments. The figures seem rather cold and remote. Isset Kotelnikova runs a tarot school, the Gates of Isis, based on the system of Papus. You can see more cards on their web site taro.isset.ru
18 May 2011
I recently received some tarots issued with the Femme Actuelle magazine some years ago. One of these, entitled Le Tarot du Cosmos, turns out to be a small version of Le Tarot de l'Ange Liberté which was a series of remarkable paintings by Myrrha based on poems of Victor Hugo. Seeing these again I wanted to search out some more information about the artist, and I found a web page in French which gives quite a clear picture of Myrrha. These artworks are rather impressive pieces and I noticed that three of them quote symbolically from the 16th century alchemical manuscript Splendor Solis, which shows, as part of its sequence of images, a series of symbolic events taking place in flasks. Myrrha reworks these into card 12, 13 and 15.
17 May 2011
I have recently bought a considerable number of tarots some of which I will post up here in the coming days. I was very gladdened to be able to obtain a tarot from the Canary Islands. This is the Tarot del Universo issued with a book by José María Doria apparently in 1989 at Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The artwork by Rafael Trelles is surreal with quite astounding and original images.
11 May 2011
I finally got round to buying a copy of the Wild Wood Tarot by Mark Ryan and John Matthews. It had been out for a few months but a mass market tarot such as this will be around for some years, so I had not rushed to buy it. I am so glad I did. The artwork by Will Worthington is marvellous. He has already produced fine artwork for other tarots and sets of oracle cards, but in this deck he truly surpasses all his previous work. Each design is meticulously draw in fine pen line then coloured with water based colour. He applies many layers of different, though related, colours to build up a texture, depth of tone and saturation to key areas of the images. His rendering of birds and animals is a delight. Compared with some other mass market decks whose artwork is flat and dead, here each image is alive and its visual space full of life. Just look at his depiction of water below the Kingfisher. The original paintings would be well worth collecting if ever they came onto the market.
10 May 2011
I recently bought a Spanish tarot entitled Tharhots 1313. This is a conventional 22 card tarot which is provided with an extra set of 22 cards with short text cues to the meanings of the cards. The artwork is naive, and it appears to be by an untrained artist rather than someone attempting to mimic that style. They are simple line drawings in pen which have been coloured, with no modelling, using coloured pencil.
9 May 2011
Beth Seilonen's latest tarot is called Awareness. She tells me it arose out of a feeling she had recently of being caught up in the fog of life. In this tarot she explores a new style. Many of her tarots are clearly delineated and speak immediately to us. For this deck the tarot forms are more submerged in layers of textured watercolour, like a film or fog. A very interesting approach. It is issued as a very small edition of only 12. Buy one soon.
4 May 2011
It was foxes a few days ago, now its rabbits and hopefully in a few weeks it will be even more penguins. The Canadian artist illustrator Jessica Clayman has now produced the Twilight Rabbit Tarot, which she sells through Etsy and on her website www.twilightrabbit.com, is a full 78 card deck, with emblematic pips, which do not follow the Pamela Colman Smith images. Here the four suits are rabbit oriented, Clover, Passions, Carrots and Stone. The cards have a stylised frame and the artwork is digitally created with the outlines perhaps drawn first in pen.
3 May 2011
Djinn is series of French graphic novels written by Jean Dufaux and illustrated by the Spanish artist Ana Miralles. The 10th volume in the Djinn series, entitled Le Pavillon des Plaisirs includes a set of tarot majors by Ana Miralles. Each card reflects one of the characters in the novel.
30 April 2011
Bafun Books in Taiwan have issued this year the Love Tarot as cut out cards in a book for the childrens market written by Stephen Lee. The artwork is by a woman artist who uses the nickname Pinpei. She uses coloured pencil on a rough textured paper which gives a grainy effect to large areas of colour.
29 April 2011
I recently obtained a copy of the Fox Tarot by Mary Hoy, sold through her Cageddreams.com. Mary Hoy works primarily in the digital medium. This is a full 78 card deck, professionally printed and supplied in a transparent plastic box. The minors do not copy the Pamela Colman Smith imagery. Mary Hoy produces some wonderfully cute depictions. Strength is particularly amusing, with a fox stroking a rabbit (in place of the usual lion) entirely inverting reality.
28 April 2011
Ryuji Kagami is a well known author of books on astrology and fortune telling. He has been involved in the design of a number of tarot decks. I recently bought a copy of a magazine from 2004 published by Shogakuka, which contains a cut out gift tarot entitled One Oracle or the Good Luck Tarot. The artwork though simple presents a stylish set of designs, somewhat similar to that os the Soulful Tarot, 2005 which he designed in collaboration with Yoshitaka Yasumatsu. This One Oracle tarot was a little bit more expensive as it is by a well known tarot designer and was intact inside a seven year old magazine.
26 April 2011
The Mirror Tarot by Himoko Rose is included in the Misty magazine of February 2011. It is a push out deck which comes in a plastic bag inserted into the magazine. Now I wonder how many of these will go missing ! The designs are rather fine.
25 April 2011
The Spider Tarot by Lua is included in Arte Miss Fortune Telling magazine issued in 2011.
24 April 2011
I am often made aware that many of my fellow tarot collectors think me rather silly to collect the given away or gift tarots included as promotions in some Japanese magazines. I suppose some must look down on these productions and see them as insignificant. Well, I take a contrary view. Some of the artwork is of very high quality. As far as collectability is concerned, I would suggest that, if in a few years time, you want to acquire one of these tarots you will have great difficulties in sourcing a copy. You might, possibly, eventually find a copy of the magazine, but will the tarot deck still be included? They are, after all, meant to be detatched and used as cards. Recently I bought four such magazines which include tarots.
Here are examples of the card designs by Moira Yuuki from the Chakra Magazine No.4., 2011.
21 April 2011
The Kitchen Tarot is a rather amusing, inexpensive and well-produced 22 card tarot deck created by Susan Shie, who works in collage, painting and digital art. The originals for these card designs were very large, being from 3 to 8 feet in height. The cards have names reflecting kitchen imagery, though the designs incorporate the original tarot arcana. Thus, The Magician is named "Salt and Pepper", The Lovers "Cream and Sugar" and The World is "Potluck. The imagery on the cards is very detailed so one continually finds new references and subtle humour. The small book that is included in the strong card box was written by Dennis Fairchild, the author of many books on the subject of divination.
13 April 2011
I have just obtained a rather obscure tarot deck, the Fetish Tarot. This was produced in Berlin, though I am still uncertain as to the date it was created. It is a full 78 card deck of posed photographs by the art photographer Reinhard Haberberger. A small group of models are posed in various fetish situations to illustrate aspects of the tarot imagery. This deck was produced for Realm of Steel, a company in Germany selling handmade steel cuffs. The photographs are rather dark in tone and have been manipulated through Photoshop or some other software to add a top layer with a texture to make them look like old abraded photographs. The majors are in the usual tarot of Marseilles fashion while the suits are various fetish devices, cuffs, cords, whips and scalpels.
12 April 2011
Durarara is a Japanese light novel series written by Ryohgo Narita, which was adaptated into an anime which began airing in Japan in 2010. The series is about a dullahan working as an underworld courier in Ikebukuro, Japan, an internet-based anonymous gang called Dollars, and the chaos that unfolds around the most dangerous people in Ikebukuro. The heroine of the series, also known as "The Black Biker" or "The Headless Rider", is a dullahan from Ireland who came to Japan looking for her stolen head. Presumably she is the figure seen on the Death card. A game based on the series for the PlayStation Portable was also released in 2010. A Taiwanese fan of Durarara has now self-published a tarot based on the characters from this series. Each card, strangely, has "keep out" police style tape across the images. I have no ideas why this is so, but it may be this is referenced in the manga or anime. It comes in a rather fine quality black velvet pouch. I got my copy from the dealer Baby Dream, who sells these on Ebay at the moment.
10 April 2011
Yesterday the Tarot de los Antiguos (The Ancient Tarot) arrrived in the post. It was created by the Spanish artist Miguel Angel Lopez Melgarajo and published in 2010 by one of the leading esoteric publishers in Spain, based in Barcelona. Born in 1960, Melgarajo had a series of spiritual experiences between 1984-87 which coloured and influenced his artwork. For his Tarot de los Antiguos he took the standard 22 major arcana and added a further 14 to make a grand total of 36 cards. The extra cards are a series of abstract ideas - The Mask, Love, the Cross of Another, Conscience, Power, Freedom, Mystical Revolution, Transcendence, Imagination, Will, Faith, Silence, The Form, The End - The Beginning. Melgarajo is known for his life drawing, so many of the figures in these cards are wonderful nudes.
8 April 2011
Lynyrd Narciso is a prolific creator of tarot decks based in the Philippines. He is always exploring new styles, new themes and ways of expressing tarot imagery. I have twelve of his decks including the recently issued Tarot of the Curious East. He has produced this in an edition limited to 50 copies. For this deck he had adopted the unfamiliar landscape format, which allows him to explore the imagery in a new way. One day his limited edition decks will be very collectable. This deck appears only to be available through the Tarot Garden store.
7 April 2011
There are many Rider-Waite clones. This rather fine version by Osel, a full 78 card deck, is included as cut out cards in a book issued by Easy Quick publishers of Taiwan in 2011.
6 April 2011
A few days ago I bought a set of tarot designs printed for a book cover Im Haus der Gefiederten Schlange ("In the House of the Feathered Snake") by Frederick Hetman, published in 1990. The artwork is by Tilman Michalski. I was much impressed by the image for the Star which shows a polyhedron called a stellated icosidodecahedron, thus playing with the word as well as the image. I quickly realised that some of the artwork was very similar to that in Madru das Baumtarot published as a set of cards in 2000. This was also by Hetman and Michalski. Not all the images correspond but there is some obvious re-use of elements of the composition in many cards.
5 April 2011
I have a small number of Mexican tarots. This has now increased to eight items with my recent acquisition of the Tarot Santero, published with a book by Ediciones Fenix in 2010. This is obviously a deck whose symbolism incorporates ideas and imagery from Santeria, the Carribean religion derived from West Africa magical traditions. There are now a number such decks going under the name of Santeria, Voudoo, Lukumi, Orisha among others. This deck of 24 cards connects closely to the conventional tarot. For example Oshun is the High Priestess, Obatala is the Emperor and so on.
4 April 2011
I have just updated my tarot collection listing. I currently have 2168 tarots, with more in the post! I have bought some really interesting items recently, but as I have been producing some books, I have not had time to put some entries up here on the weblog. I hope to find time to remedy this in the next few days.
22 March 2011
I have been looking for a particular Polish tarot for some years. Though not particularly rare, I found it difficult to source a copy. Two turned up on Ebay auctions a few years ago but I was never successful at the bidding. This is the Tarot Karty Ktore Wroza by Jan Witold Suliga. The designs are printed in a stapled booklet and it seems intended that one manually cut them out as cards. A month or so ago a fellow tarot collector based in Poland found me a copy and has very kindly presented it to me as a gift. The card designs are by Jan Opalinski an artist known for his strength in drawing. The tarot mind behind the designs was Jan Witold Suliga, a key figure in modern Polish tarot.
21 March 2011
Sad Story is a rather fine Korean tarot. The artwork is by Kwon Shina and apparently first appeared in a comic book in 2000. It seems the designs were issued as a tarot deck in 2007. The cards have no titles or numbers but are immediately recognisable. The little white booklet is entirely in Korean so I am unable to find out much about the deck. Korean tarots are much undercollected and ignored, though there are many wonderful items issued there. They don't last long in print, so one must collect them as soon as they come available.
17 March 2011
There are a number of tarots issued in Thailand. I try to buy anything that comes available, so I recently obtained the Pai Thai Payakorn Tarot created by Narudol Wijitranon and published Samnakpimbookdimon in 2010. This is a Rider Waite clone localised with Thai imagery. It is created with fine pen lines coloured with pencil. The colours are deeply saturated creating vibrant imagery. It is available at the moment through a store on Ebay
2 March 2011
I have been very busy over the last month or so with publishing books. I have been able to produce an art book of some of my coloured alchemical engravings. You can see this on my art weblog. This is not to say that my tarot collecting has ceased, indeed, I have continued to add some interesting items and have a batch of tarots on its way to me from Taiwan at the moment. So watch this space. Today, I will show the Hive Tarot which a colleague in Los Angeles managed to obtain for me. This was based on a collaborative art project by the Hive Gallery. These are big cards created to show the artwork and not intended necessarily for use as a working tarot deck. It was produced as a small edition of 100 copies, so it will be well worth collecting. The artwork is creative and playful, and some images are quite astounding.
9 February 2011
Yesterday I received an amazing art tarot in the form of 22 etchings. This was created by the Colombian artist Catalina Cabrera in 2000. It is in the form of an edition of 75 numbered in normal numbers and five special issues with Roman numerals. There are still a few copies left of this edition for sale. The distributor is the art dealer Juan Carlos Tovar jct_@hotmail.com. You can see the complete set of images on a website here. It comes in a strong solid box with each engraving being interleaved with tissue. This is the only tarot I have from Colombia. It will be an essential addition to any collection of South Amercian tarots.
1 February 2011
There is now only one copy left of the Diary of a Broken Soul. First come first served !
27 January 2011
Yesterday I received a very interesting art tarot that I bought from an artist in Italy. There were not his work but those of Najib bin Omar, a Yemeni artist who worked during the 1990's in Italy. As I did not have any tarots that I knew to be created by a Moslem, I was very interesting in buying this. It is in the form of etchings (which were actually created by Alfredo di Prinzio in 1977) which Najib bin Omar hand coloured in 1997. A set of only five copies were made for Art Box 49 and these were sold as individual sheets rather than as complete sets. When I saw these for sale again as individual items, I decided to buy the complete set in order to keep it together as a creation. The colouring is very well executed, and though creative, retains a respect for and does not dominate over the original. These are not cards but a set of 22 engravings coloured by hand. These were expensive, but I felt it right to buy these to preserve the orginal. The arabic at the bottom of each plate merely records Najib bin Omar as colouring the images and gives the year 1418 in the Year of the Prophet that these were made (our 1997).
23 January 2011
Another Hungarian Tarot I recently obtained is the Bharat/Nagy Tarot, a majors only deck created by Joshi Bharat and Laszlo Nagy in 1992. They adopt a style based on the Rider Waite, and mimic, using a number of graphic techniques, its line drawn woodcut style and the flat areas of colour tones used in the screen printing. In many places they depart from the standard imagery, for example the Tower and the Moon, while cards such as the Magician adhere closely to the Pamela Colman Smith designs. The cards are covered with a reticulated or textured lamination.
22 January 2011
I have managed to acquire a few more Hungarians tarots. Among these is the Erzsebet Tarot created in 1998 by Dr. Hollo Erzsebet. The designs are in fine different coloured lines, probably using coloured pencil. This is a rather attractive effect suited to the ethereal, almost fairy like forms the artist depicts. Areas of the drawings have been coloured and modelled, probably in coloured pencil, but possibly watercolour - the cards are too small to be definitive. The overall effect is quite delightful. The cards are quite rare outside Hungary. Two versions of this were apparently issued. I have the one without the line border. This gives the cards a clean sharp quality. The imagery clearly follows the tarot archetypes, though some dispense with the obvious elements and are more minimalist. This does not appear to be recorded in Kaplan's volumes.
21 January 2011
I just discovered a wonderful tarot, O Tarot do Amor, issued with a book in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1995. The designs by Vinicius Pradella are quite amazing, being both creative and delightfully painted. The book is written by Eduardo Molinero. Pradella is a surrealist artist mostly working in oils with a considerable reputation. The cards are large allowing the details to be seen. You can see some of his other work here.
17 January 2011
The Plumoi Tarot is a cut out deck printed on thick card bound into the January, 2011 issue of Koiunreki magazine. The foreground figures in thick black line really pop out from the coloured backgrounds. You can see the deck on the animated page www.plumoi.jp/fc/omiyage/tarot
16 January 2011
I missed out on the publication of Emily Carding's Tarot of the Black Mountain which was included as tear out illustrations for a book published in Croatia in 2009 of short stories on a tarot theme by Lena Ruth Stefanovic. Luckily, a dealer in Los Angeles managed to find a set of the cards signed by Emily Carding and I was able to buy these. It is a majors-only deck based on the landscape, people, myths, and history of Montenegro.
15 January 2011
The Jump Tarot appears to be a self published doujinshi tarot celebrating the artwork of the Japanese Shonen Jump manga magazine. This deck seems to issue from Taiwan. I must try and find out some more information about this deck. Like many other small edition self published tarots there seems to be no information about it readily available on the Internet. It is a rather fine production, well printed and packaged in a flip top box.
11 January 2011
The Pictarot was issued in Germany in late 2010. The Minors are a conventional playing card deck with an additional court card for each suit. The Majors were artwork created by different graphic artists specialising in cartoon characters, though the style coheres, rather than being merely a muddle of 22 individual contributions. The LWB contains a rather unlikely story about the origins of this deck. It is amusing how people like to mythologise the simple matter of creating or choosing artwork !
10 January 2011
I recently bought a copy of a French tarot from 1980, the Astrocards of Frederic Maisonblanche. It does not seem to be mentioned in Kaplan. The box contains two sets of cards, a tarot of Marseilles style deck with two extra cards, and a set of 12 astrological cards using images of the zodiac, which are larger than the tarot set. The tarot deck, at first glance appears to be a conventional tarot of Marseilles, but one quickly realises that the expressions of the faces are designed to subtly amuse.
Here are two of the astrological cards which follow the style of the tarot of Marseilles.
7 January 2011
Another of my Art Tarot series is close to selling out its edition. There are today only five copies left to sell of the Diary of a Broken Soul. Anyone wishing a copy should buy one now. I never reprint decks. Once it is sold out there will be no more copies to sell. Most collectors nowadays hold on to their collection, rather than sell items, so there will be few copies of this deck available on the secondhand market for years to come.
3 January 2011
Square Enix, the Japanese computer games publisher, has now issued a rather delightfully drawn tarot, Tactics Ogre Battle. This is probably a promotional deck for their remake of the 1995 classic Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together in development for the PlayStation Portable.
30 December 2010
I have a number of alchemical tarots. Probably close to twenty items. A month or so ago I was delighted to be able to buy a copy of the alchemical tarot designed by my friend Rafal Prinke back in the early 1980's. I have been hoping to get a copy of this rather rare item for some years. A few days ago a box of tarots from Londa Marks arrived from the USA. Among these is her Alchemist Tarot. The artwork is in her unique style. The foreground figures are paintings of figures with her stylised characteristics - elongated bodies, triangular faces, amazing big hair, or entirely bald, gothic style of dress. These are set against a complex background of collaged photographs and images that have been digitally modified. The whole effect integrates together to give strong, powerful and engaging images.
28 December 2010
I recently bought, through the good offices of the Far Eastern tarot dealer Baby Dream, a rather fine promotional tarot issued by a comic books company. This is the KK-Shinema Tarot. The artwork in manga style is a showcase for the various artists who work for the company.
27 December 2010I found this rather fine image of a fool in a painting The Parable of the Prodigal Son by the strangely named Master of the Female Half-Lengths, active around 1490-1540. This "Master" is the name given by art historians to a yet to be identified artist who specialised in half-length female figures. This painting is thus uncharacteristic of him and I am not sure how it became assigned to him. In any case, we have a rather fine image of a fool.
24 December 2010
The Secret Tarot by Benny published this year in Hong Kong, comes in a rather fine solid box together with a book. The artwork, by Mr. Hung, is entirely in Western art style. Benny Wong is a psychic who owns a shop in Hong Kong where among other things he gives tarot readings.
23 December 2010
When you buy a tarot from the Philippine artist Lynyrd Narciso, you get a little tarot thrown in for free. With his recent Tarot Rikit he excelled himself by enclosing two free tarots. These are in miniature format - one in colour Tarot of PSY Chicks and the other in black and white. These are also in limited editions. It will be best to buy copies quickly as there won't be many left shortly.
22 December 2010
I have now uploaded the remaining lessons of my Study Course on the Artwork of Modern Tarot to my website. Sadly people did not support my approach to tarot as artwork. I had hoped to get such sufficient response that I could have continued to produce further courses and eventually completely cover the phenomenon of the artwork of tarot in our age, but I sold so few of the first study course that I cannot justify spending the hundreds of hours necessary to develop further lessons. Probably people will catch up with me in a few years time, and eventually come to see the value of my approach, but it will by then be too late. My course just did not engage and enthuse more than a handful of fellow collectors who share my way of looking at tarot as art. Hundreds of web sites sell pointless waffle and regurgitated courses on tarot reading, as that seems to be what people want. If people don't respond to my work then there is nothing I can do. Few people seem to value tarot as art. I am lucky to have been able to contact a few similar minded people. So I now make the entire course freely available on my web site page. Perhaps one day someone will come forward and financially support the further development of the study course. I have done all I can.
22 December 2010
Lynyrd Narciso, the Philippine tarot artist, has just produced his Tarot Rikit. It is in the same luxuriously textured style as he created for the Tarot ng Daigdig sa Balintataw which I published in 2009. The colour pallete is wonderfully harmonised.
21 December 2010
I just bought a tarot based on an exhibition that opened in May 2009 at the Il Vicolo gallery in Cesena in Italy. This was entitled Il Diavolo & l'Acquasanta Tarocchi Fantastici and seems to have been a grand affair involving various cultural figures in that region of Italy. The artwork is modern and about half of the pieces were sculpture, and half are paintings, photographs and collage.
17 December 2010
I now have a rather fine black and white pen and brush drawn tarot created by the prolific Japanese illustrator Ogasa Shin. Entitled Ace of Tarot this is apparently self-published. It is a wonderful art deck and especially as it has been created in conventional media rather than being entirely digitally rendered as is common with Japanese tarot nowadays. Ogasa Shin really knows how to use the dynamic interplay of white space and black areas in these drawings.
16 December 2010
I have just received a Japanese tarot called the Kojiki Tarot designed by Seiko Kisaki. Kojiki is an ancient Japanese mythological text with poems and songs telling of the creation of the Universe and stories of the Gods and Goddesses that shaped it. This dates from the early 8th century and was composed by Ono Yasumaro by Imperial request. The Kojiki records the mythological origin of the four home islands of Japan, and the Kami or Shinto spirits. The myths contained in the Kojiki are part of the inspiration behind Shinto practices and myths. This tarot comes with a little booklet with some description of how each card corresponds to some god or goddess.
15 December 2010
The Linol Tarot was created by Gerhard Haack in 1988 in Kassel in Germany. It is a full deck with minors and an additional card. It was issued as a signed and numbered edition of 150 copies. The images on the pip cards do not slavishly follow the Colman Smith emblems for the Rider Waite deck, but work within that style. The deck is said to be named after the supposed method of printing - linoleum block prints. I have examined the cards closely and cannot see how these could have been printed or even created as linocuts. It appears more likely that these are printed using serigraphy (commercial screen printing).
15 December 2010
Some years ago I saw some images of this tarot, the Tarocchi di Verona, but I cannot remember where. However, I recently was able to buy a copy, but now cannot find out anything about it. It seems to rely, for some of the card imagery, on various architectural monuments in Verona. The backgrounds are printed in a matt gold ink.
13 December 2010
There is something quite delightful about round tarots. The first appears to be the Nature Tarot issued in Japan in 1980. Many feminist inspired tarots then emerged in the 1980s using the round format, and it is now an established style. I recently obtained, through the good offices of a tarot dealer in Los Angeles, the Sumeremilhun Tarot issued by Emil Kazanlar in 2002 in Hungary. The cards designs take inspiration from Sumerian bas-reliefs and some Byzantine manuscripts. They appear to have been created in gouache. Kazanlar is, of course, best known for the tarot he produced in 1996 published by AGM Müller.
10 December 2010
I just received the Natural Tarot, a set of the conventional Rider Waite images printed onto cherry wood as thin as card. There are a few tarot decks on wood, all being made in different ways. This Natural Tarot is printed directly on the wood, the Pirate Tarot was laser etched line drawings onto thin cherry giving a relief effect, the multitude of Tarots created by Endre Rousseaux were printed papers pasted onto plywood "cards" and heavily varnished, and finally the Wooden Kashmir are hand carved plaques of walnut. Some years ago I missed out on some Japanese wooden tarot, which I believe were made by pyrography.
9 December 2010
I just updated the list of my collection. I had over 50 items to add which I had acquired since August. My collection now amounts to 2124 items with more currently in the post !
9 December 2010
A few days ago I received a rather beautiful tarot from Hungary, A Tarot Titkai (secrets of the tarot) by Katalin Szegedi. It comes with a small booklet in Hungarian written by Zsofia Lazar. The colours are quite delightful. This was originally published in the early 1990's and is difficult to source, so it is rather good that that this has now been reprinted.
3 December 2010
In February this year I bought a copy of the Tarocchi della Notte by Maria Carmen Franca. This was a signed and numbered edition of 50 copies and I was very lucky to obtain number 1. She has now produced a new tarot Tarocchi I Colori e I Sogni (The tarot of colour and dreams) in an edition of only 25 decks. I immediately bought a copy. She very thoughtfully reserved number 1 of this deck for me. This is a full deck of 78 cards.
28 November 2010
The last two weeks I have been working flat out on my new Study Course on the Garden of Earthly Delights painting by Hieronymous Bosch and unable to do much on the tarot. I have, however, found this interesting exhibition by Aya Takano the prolific manga artist, illustrator, and science fiction essayist. She has several serialised publications, and is regularly featured in subculture articles. In the art markets of Europe and America, her paintings and drawings are enthusiastically received. Her exhibition at the Frieder Burda Museum in Germany can be seen through this link. The original designs for her tarot cards can be seen in the Exhibition. You can buy the cards at a reasonable price from some dealers.
14 November 2010
I don't usually buy decks that do not have a totally obvious tarot structure, but I could not resist the recently published Deck of Skulls by CJ Miller and Sarah White. There are twenty two cards, but these do not directly relate to the conventional tarot archetypes, though there are some resonances. It is available from SeriousWaffles. The dark Gothic artwork is what attracted me to the deck.
3 November 2010
Amy von Harrington is a New York based artist who works in a variety of media including collage. She has just created a full tarot deck of 78 collaged cards issued as a limited edition of 40 copies. Her style is funny, irreverent, playful, and in places sexually explicit. Her cards were sold at the Capricious gallery in Brooklyn. There is an interview about how she created her tarot to be seen here.
2 November 2010
Today I received the Penguin Tarot produced in Japan by Mamoru and Hisae Hamatsu. It is quite delightful and joins the growing rank of animal themed decks. We used only to have Cat tarots, but now there are rabbit, mouse, snail, fox, mice, ferret and a whole slew of bird tarots. The artwork for the Penguin tarot is extremely good. It comes with a little booklet in Japanese.
29 October 2010
I have been rather busy this week working on a new project, so was not able to put up an entry here, despite having a pile of decks I would like to draw to your attention. Here is a rather good pencil drawn deck. This was created by M. Thot under the title Il Libro di Thot and published by Aldo Castelli in Milan. It is not clear if "Thot" was a nom de plume of Castelli. From the packaging it looks like it was published some time in the 1980's, but I have not been able to find an actual data. It does not appear to be in Kaplan's Encyclopedia.
22 October 2010
Collecting tarot cards may seem to be a rather introverted and isolating activity, but in fact tarot art does respond to and reflect many aspects of culture, and as I have noted many times, tarot art documents our cultural history. It works the other way too. Tarot sometimes does influence artists and musicians at the forefront of cultural movements. Last night I was surprised to hear from an influential rapper from Pittsburgh called Kellee Maize. She has a deep interest in tarot and this informs and structures much of her work. Her latest album, Aligned Archetype, is a piece constructed through tarot. It explores "alter egos" or archetypes, and the songs are arranged as the answers to a tarot card reading with the question, "How can I align all the energies affecting my body, mind, and spirit and all the different archetypes with my being to help create real change on the planet?". So she is a rapper with a positive message, seeking answers to cultural change through tarot imagery.
Being 62 years old I do not usually find rap music easy to listen to. Usually the words are so skewed and stretched by the singer that I cannot make out what they are singing. Kellee Maize is not only inventive but can sing at amazing speed without losing diction, so unlike most rappers I could clearly hear what she was singing. Rap is so fast that the first time one listens to a track it really stresses the brain. I suppose it is a kind of verbal jazz, where the invention lies not in the stream of notes but in the stream of words. I suppose after listening to a track many times one loses that first dizzying careering struggle to keep up with the stream of singing. Maize is so sharp and fleet in her vocals. Like Lady Gaga there is a palpably visible intelligence to her writing. I do wish her success.
I sit here in my apartment surrounded by books, tarot cards and paintings, tapping information into a database and working on ways to explore Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, introspective and scholarly tasks that will only interest a very few, while others such as Kellee Maize are out there standing in front of large audiences attempting to use this imagery to effect cultural change.
21 October 2010
I must say, being an artist myself, I do like tarots created as oil paintings. There are not that many. A rather fine example arrived this morning. This is a Japanese promotional gift, rather difficult to find, and consequently expensive. It is called the RK Astrology of Love Tarot and came in a little velvet bag.
19 October 2010
I recently obtained an Egyptian tarot previously unknown to me. This was produced by Editions Rå in 1985. That is the sum total of my knowledge about this deck. I hope that some of my fellow collectors might be able to provide me with some further information.
16 October 2010
Yesterday I had a visit from one of the major figures in tarot, Mary Greer. This visit was arranged by another well known promoter of all things tarot, Marcus Katz. It was really interesting to have a discussion about the state of tarot today. I resisted the impulse to overload my visitors by merely pressing them to look at tarot deck after tarot deck - that requires many many hours - and instead we had an exchange of views and information about what is going on in the world of tarot, on the various forums, conferences and events, as well as catching up on news about individual tarot artists and creators. Before they left, I could not resist letting them glance through some of my collection, if only to give a sense of the sheer mass of diverse material that constitutes the artwork of modern tarot. Marcus, who has visited me a few times, never loses his enthusiasm and excitement at seeing a tarot previously unknown to him.
15 October 2010
Over the last week I have been working on my Tarot Art database and so I have not had time to keep up the weblog. I think this database will, in the longer term, be important for the study of the artwork of modern tarot. Other people have occasionally begun similar projects but been unable to complete them. Also many of these attempts have been made by scouring the Internet for information, an unreliable method. The entries in my database are not such second-hand information. Each item is in my collection and my description of each tarot is made with the deck, book and packaging at hand. My methodology is also consistent as it is not drawn from various people's opinions. Also my focus is entirely on the art in the tarot, and not on the divinatory, esoteric or philosophical aspects. The database currently has 500 items in it, and I have focussed on the Far Eastern tarots to begin with, the Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese and Korean. I will gradually work through it country by country until all the over 2100 items in my collection have been added. It will take some time ! Probably up to a year.
8 October 2010
I have now uploaded the weekly update to the database with another 65 items. I have now added about 90% of my Japanese items and will add the remaining over the next month or so.
www.alchemywebsite.com/tarot/database/tarot0.html
I will eventually make it possible for users to browse just the tarots of individual countries, and will implement this for the Japanese items within the next few weeks.
Initially the database will be based on my own collection, as I have the cards physically at hand. Once I have entered all of my collection, say in a year or so, then I will ask fellow collectors to provide me with details of tarots I do not have, so that the database can become more comprehensive. Hopefully, it will become an important resource on the artwork of modern tarot.
Thanks again to the many fellow enthusiasts who have corrected some of the errors and given me additional information to complete an entry.
There is much more to do, but a substantial beginning has now been made with over 400 items catalogued.
7 October 2010
Much of this week I have devoted to creating entries in my database of tarot. I am, to a great extent focussing this week on the Japanese items im my collection. Each entry requires some research and writing up some descriptive information. My database deals primarily with the artwork. I will be updating the entries online every Friday. This week I should have added over 50 items. It would be great if I could manage to keep to this target every week but I doubt I will be able to allocate the time, as I have to make a living. There are currently 400 items in the database and if I kept to the present rate I could probably complete it within six months. It will be a substantial resource for anyone studying tarot art. I intend to work on individual countries at a time, and after I have completed the Japanese entires I will turn to the Taiwanese and Chinese deecks.
5 October 2010
Modern Tarot does not have a long history. When we use the term an "early tarot" in the context of modern tarot, then we mean one printed in the 1960s. I have now obtained one of these rarities, a copy of the Dimitri Papavasiliu Tarot published in Athens in 1969. This 78 card deck comes in a hardbound book, contained in pockets at the back. It is a variation on the Tarot of Marseilles.
4 October 2010
I recently obtained a Mexican tarot, which adds one to my collection of six. Sadly I know nothing about it. I never heard of this tarot before and can find nothing about it except that it was published by Gomez Gomez Hermanos Editores.
1 October 2010
I often say that there is little point in studying tarot art from fuzzy jpegs from web sites, and that nothing can approach having the actual physical cards in hand. This is especially exemplified by the Tarot de Jean-Luc Bonicel. Published in 1986, this must be among the best of collage tarots. For his source material Bonicel used fine line engraving, probably steel engravings from the 19th and early 20th century. These have extremely fine lines with almost no softness to the edges. He uses hundreds of individual components to make up each card. I expect these were photographed on a litho process camera on a large negative which then was corrected and any edges of the paper layers stopped out. The result is some amazingly complex collaged images. When scanned and jpeged all of the crispness is lost and one only has a fuzzy, muddy mess to look at. This is an expensive tarot but well worth the price. It is at the summit of what can be achieved in black and white collage though only owners of an actual deck will appreciate this.
30 September 2010
I have managed to plug another hole in my collection, the Omaho Old Market Tarot from 1988, which had eluded me. A couple of copies had surfaced over the last five or six years on Ebay but I had not managed to win the auctions. The artist Samuel Mercer worked in watercolour without using containing pen or pencil lines. This gives a rather nice effect and style to the artwork. He seems to have used the Oswald Wirth deck as his primary inspiration.
29 September 2010
I am beginning to work on a descriptive database of my collection which I am making available online as a finding aid or reference source for tarot art. There are many items to describe and as I cannot afford to drop everything else and merely work on this, it is likely to take a year or two. I will add items gradually. The first version of this with about 250 items now replaces the Tarot directory link. There will be one page for each tarot and I will try and implement a search engine over the next few weeks.
29 September 2010
Many of my fellow collectors do not like tarots as illustrations in books and prefer to limit themselves to those in card format. They miss out on many art tarots, as many of these are exhibited in a gallery as a series of artworks then issued in a printed catalogue. This applies to the Jak Flash Major Arcana which consists of a series of wonderful posed photographs. This series of photgraphs was the subject of an exhibition in Birmingham earlier this year. You can see details here. The book issued at the same time has very fine printed images. It is not especially expensive. Jak Flash is very inventive and finds some beautiful images for the Majors. The Tower can be a challenging image for artists, but here he has found a rather wonderful way of depicting it. The makeup on many of the models is astounding. He acknowledges special effects and artistic make-up artist Julia Hyland in particular. You will have to buy the book to see the artwork in full detail.
28 September 2010
The Tarot Feminine is a bit of amusement from Australia in the style of pin-up or erotic playing cards. Nothing pornographic, indeed these photographs are the sort of images one sees in established publications. Nothing much erotic, and nothing much of tarot imagery either. One can see small hints in the "Majors" but nothing in the "Minors". Here we are at the outer limits of tarot when its imagery is almost dissolved away. Only those striving for completion and an exhaustive collection would think to buy this deck.
27 September 2010
Apparently the idea for the new deck from Beth Seilonen arose from her being invited to the Bay Area Tarot Symposium (BATS) in August 2010. Thus it was produced in celebration of the BATS. So we have the White Bat Tarot in an edition limited to 25 copies. The imagery of the minors is subtly based on the Pamela Colman Smith minors for the Rider-Waite deck.
26 September 2010
I have now had to bud off another archive, the fourth, for the weblog, in order to reduce the time required for the browsers to build the page. The archives now amount to over half a megabyte of text and 44 megabytes of images !
26 September 2010
In my entry on this weblog for 3 June 2008 I showed a Buddhist tarot from Thailand. I have now managed to obtain another Thai Buddhist Tarot. This is based on photographs of Buddhist artwork, both paintings and sculpture. Each card has a different coloured background.
25 September 2010
I have decided to make my course on the Artwork of Modern Tarot freely available on this website. This year I have sold so few copies despite the low price, that I think it best to abandon any further attempt to promote sales. The course is entirely original. It presents ways of looking at tarot as art. All other tarot courses focus entirely on the use of tarot for divination, something I have no interest in nor can engage with. In 2005/6 I wrote this extensive course of 25 lessons exploring ways one can look at tarot as art and as it required considerable research, I am reluctant merely to withdraw it, and instead I will make it freely available for people to study. I will, time permitting, begin to add further lessons to it over the next few years. I do realise that this original piece of research will quickly be pirated. The pirates love original material. My name will be obliterated and someone else (whose sole ability is to be able to cut and paste) assume the credit for writing it, but those who know my style will recognise it. It is a risk but I want to make my approach available to people. I am continually amazed that so few people see any value in looking at tarot as an art format. I am keen to promote tarot as art and will be launching a few projects over the next months to try and encourage people to look at tarot in this way. I have put up the first seven lessons onto the course page and will add the remaining items next week.
24 September 2010
In 1983 I brought together my friend Rafal Prinke with a Scottish artist I knew, Edward O'Donnelly, to produce the designs for an alchemical tarot deck. This was based on existing alchemical emblems from engravings and woodcuts, which were brought together and given a tarot context by Rafal. Edward then redrew the images from the original engravings. I then planned to print these as a set of cards and have Edward hand colour an edition of 150 copies and even annouced a publication date of November 1983. This project did not work out, partly because the printing equipment available to me at that time could not print solid blacks on the two sides of card thick enough to be handcoloured. Some years later, in 1988, I published the designs in my Hermetic Journal magazine, and these were seen by K. Frank Jensen who was so enthused by them that he wanted to publish these and a year later he issued the Alchemical Tarot in an edition of 100 cards. These were hand coloured following Rafal Prinke's suggestions.
I have always regretted not buying one of those decks, and though a couple have appeared on Ebay auctions in the last five years I was not successful in buying one. Now, thankfully, I have been able to obtain a copy of this deck. Yesterday was a good day when this item arrived in the post.
23 September 2010
Every now and again I find myself buying a tarot deck that no one seems to have heard of and it is neither recorded in Kaplan nor referenced on a web site. The one that came into my hands recently is Trocal's originele Tarot, a strange name indeed. This was issued in the Netherlands in 1991. Trocal® is a Dutch supplier of PVC roofing material, so I immediately dismissed this as an explanation, and looked instead for an artist of that name. Zilch! I then decided to look for the publisher Anderson and Lembke, which turned out to be a well known advertising company in 's-Hertogensbosch. It appears that this deck was some promotional item produced by the advertising agency for one of their clients supplying roofing sheets. Now I wonder if anyone else can source a copy ! The deck is made to look as if it were created as woodcuts which were hand coloured. It has a subtle humour.
22 September 2010
Last week I received a rather wonderful gift from a friend I have known since the 1980s. Some years ago this friend, a surrealist artist, told me that he had created a tarot deck during the 1980s, as part of his personal exploration of esoterics and kabbalah. He has now decided to donate his original artwork to my collection. I do have a few sets of original artwork, but this one is very special. It is a 78 card deck and full of invention but with a firm structure. I have set up a page for the Robert Ellaby Tarot which shows more of the card designs, and explores some of the symbolism he uses.
21 September 2010
In the last week or so I have managed to buy some tarots from a collection that was being sold off, that fill some gaps in my own collection. Among these is the JTG tarot by the German artist Johannes Tassilo Gruber in 1987. His original line drawings can be seen in Kaplan's Vol 3 page 269. Gruber must have reworked these into more detailed pencil drawings which model the surfaces, making his geometric forms appear embedded in three dimensions. He has a mastery of perspective and these difficult to visualise surfaces appear convincing and real. At first glance one might see this as mere surrealist abstract forms, but on more considered examination one realises that he uses geometric forms to abstractly model the tarot imagery. He makes many references to kabbalistic ideas, the four elements, the planets and the zodiacal signs, so this can be seen as a magical and esoteric deck expressed through geometric images. In my copy each card has the title, number and artist's signature added in pencil after the printing. One wonders that, after printing the cards, he thought the imagery required him to identify the individual cards. Hand labelling all 22 cards of the full edition must have taken a considerable amount of time. The edition size is 333, a reasonably large edition for an art tarot, but I have never seen a copy on sale. So when one appeared on the list of a collection being sold, I immediately bought it.
16 September 2010
The Horusov Magicni Tarot, a magical tarot issued by the publisher Horus, must be one of the very few tarot decks issued in Yugoslavia during the communist regime, before its break up that began in 1990. This deck was issued in Belgrade in 1989. It is a 78 card deck with designs by Sendain Tursic and comes with a book by Dragan Simovic and Tomislav Gavric. The designs are conventional with non-emblematic pips. I do not know of any other Yugoslavian tarots, indeed, until a few days ago I did not know of this one.
15 September 2010
I have in the last few days been able to buy a copy of the Wooden Kashmir Tarot by the Dutch artist Nicolaas van Beek. This is now the major item in my collection which is currently approaching 2100 decks. I never thought I would be able to own a copy of the Wooden Kashmir, so I have been incredibly lucky to have been able to obtain one. The deck is very beautiful and I have set up a web page about it.
15 September 2010
The other tarot from Moorea/Tahiti is the Tarot of T. Oger. The pen drawings are well executed using heavier outlines and thinner lines for details. They appear to have been coloured by pencils. Like that of its companion deck by J.R. Kahn it does not seem to be mentioned in Kaplan's Encyclopedia.
14 September 2010
There are few countries in the world which have not produced a tarot deck. Recently I bought two from Tahiti in French Polynesia, well actually from Moorea a smaller island which has only 16,000 inhabitants. Somehow a publisher Les Éditions du Lézard (the yellow lizard is the emblem of Moorea), issued two decks, probably in the 1980's. The 22 Tarots Divinatoires designed by J.R. Kahn, was created in pen drawings with coloured pencils. The art is amateurish but well realised. It does not seem to be mentioned in Kaplan's Encyclopedia and I had not heard of it until few days ago. It is a rather rare item I suspect.
8 September 2010
According to Wikipedia - Katekyo Hitman Reborn! ("Katekyo" being a portmanteau of Katei Kyoshi and translated as Home Tutor), is an ongoing Japanese manga written and illustrated by Akira Amano. The plot revolves around the life of a young boy named Tsunayoshi Sawada, who finds out that he is the next in line to become the boss of the most powerful Mafia organization, the Vongola Family. As such, the Vongola's most powerful hitman, a gun-toting infant named Reborn, is sent to tutor "Tsuna" on how to become a respectable boss. The individual manga chapters are serialized in Japan in the weekly Shonen Jump. It was released as an English language version in the USA under the shortened title of Reborn! I bought a tarot of this name recently. I am not sure if it is an official released tarot or a Doujinshi. The dealer Baby_Dream tells me that it is a Korean self-published tarot and was released this year. The designer is Bian. I am not sure if any more are available. If you want copies of these obscure Far Eastern tarots you should contact Baby_Dream on Ebay.
7 September 2010
Mirrorstarot is a rather fine full deck Rider-Waite clone from Taiwan, created in soft graduated tones, in a low-key palette. The imagery is obviously designed to appeal to children. It is printed in a matt finish. The designs are by a graphic artist using the name of Cyberstar and follow quite closely the original Pamela Colman Smith images.
6 September 2010
Along with the Energy Tarot I also bought a set of small cards, the Tarocchi Sigma, which was issued with an Italian book on the history of tarot and tarot reading Leggere i tarocchi by Maurizio Elettrico published by Sigma Libri Gruppo Editoriale Esselibri, which issues much new age material. The imagery uses line drawings which have collaged elements incorporated into the cards design. Some of these drawings are printed in negative and given an intense colour, which is a rather fine effect. Some of these drawings remind me of those in alchemical manuscripts and I expect the artist has been influenced by alchemical material. The artist would appear to be the book's designer Giuseppe Ragno.
5 September 2010
I have now bought a copy of an Italian version of the German Chakra Tarot. It has the same format, with the seven chakras shown as coloured circles in a panel at the top. Here, it is called the Energy Tarot and, of course, the titles are in Italian.
3 September 2010
Emilo Ortu Lieto is an Italian artist who has over the last 5 years or so produced a number of tarot decks in small editions of only 30 copies. I already have his Tarocchi Metafisici, Tarocchi Gay Orsi and Tarocchi Sardi. His latest deck the Tarocchi Surrealisti arrived this morning. Emilo Ortu Lieto is a Set and Costume designer for stage and screen, and has worked on many well known theatrical productions and films. www.perunteatroteatrale.com/index.html
You can buy a copy probably for 100 Euros or so from an Italian dealer who distributes his work. I am sure these will appreciate in value as his art becomes recognised more widely. They will not be around long as the edition is limited to only 30 copies.
2 September 2010
The Tarot of the Boroughs: An Urban, Contemporary deck set in New York City is exactly what it says on the packet. Nearly all the posed photographs were taken by George Cortney, and he worked with Courtney Weber on the depiction of the ideas. I rather like the self-referential idea where the High Priestess is examining a tarot spread. The full deck of 78 cards can be obtained from www.tarotoftheboroughs.com
1 September 2010
I recently was able to buy a copy of an influential 1990's Taiwanese tarot, the Fairy Tarot of Yo Su-Lan (1998). What one might call manga in soft focus.
31 August 2010
The Japanese Macalon Tarot named after its creator Kato Macalon is a full 78 card Rider Waite clone designed primarily for children. Its imagery is engaging, cute and positive. You might be lucky to find copies on Ebay auctions.
30 August 2010
I recently managed to get a copy of a black and white tarot by the Japanese artist Masahiro Obara, to which a fellow collector had alterted me. They look like woodblock prints, but I suspect they have been created using pen and ink. They appear only to be available from a store in Japan where the designer, who is aslo a tarot reader, goes once a week to read fortunes. The cards are quite expensive, but this is one which, because of the unusual style of the artwork, will greatly appreciate in value once the edition is sold out. I bought two copies.
29 August 2010
In my blog entry for 23 November 2008 I showed a fan art tarot based on the anime 'Bleach'. I have now obtained a self-published tarot by another fan of this Japanese television series.
27 August 2010
The Usatarot has nothing to do with that federal union of fifty states that often seems to dominate the world of tarot publishing. Usa is actually Japanese for Rabbit (Usagi). This is a rabbit tarot self-published in Japan, nicely printed but laminated in those little pouches. It is a delightful deck, not departing far from the conventional images, but with rabbits. There are now a few rabbit tarots and this is a fine addition to this stable. This small deck will be impossible to find in a year or so. You may be lucky and be able to buy a copy from a dealer such as Baby_Dream on Ebay. I really like the use of the indefinite article at the beginning of the title of every card.
26 August 2010
The strangely named Vitas : Personal Idol Diary Tarot seems even more weird when one realises that though produced in China it has the card titles in Greek! But that is not all for although the alphabet is Greek, these transliterate into either French or English. Is this merely a muddle or is there some subtle message here? We will probbaly never know. The imagery is rather good, being computer created collage, though the densely textured backgrounds fight against the foreground images and often prevent them standing out. There are some fine images here and though quite stylish the cards are immediately recognisable from their content.
25 August 2010
When a new tarot arrives and one immediately sees from the packaging that the cards are larger than ones hands, then one can be almost certain that one is going to find an art tarot within the wrapping. This indeed happened this morning when I uncovered the Tarot MEM. The cards are 7.5 by 3.7 inches (190 x 93 mm) in size, printed on card and laminated. Some time ago 'MEM' Mark E. Merrill had been in touch with me about the possibility of my publishing his cards. There was a technical problem which made it impossible for me to do this, so it was good to discover a few weeks ago, that he had gone ahead and self-published the deck. Had I been able to publish his tarot images, I expect he would have been disappointed as there is no way I could have printed the cards at the size he has. His designs bring together many disparate visual ideas which are fused together in computer collage. I really liked the use of the image of William Burroughs, the wealthy member of the Burroughs family, who was a friend of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and wrote many novels. On his card which is entitled 'L.O.D.' (the Land of the Dead), he is shown with the gun with which he accidentally shot his wife, the crab nebula nova remnant and thus a reference to one of his best known books Nova Express, and a centipede (perhaps a drug-induiced paranoid image which rather obsessed him, being mentioned in a number of his novels, particularly the Soft Machine). Mark Merrill's collages are full of such visual references.
24 August 2010
I have now made up the remainder of the edition of the Sylph Tarot. Sadly, this has not been available for a year or so, but I have now found time to make up the copies for sale again. www.alchemywebsite.com/tarot/art_tarot04.html
23 August 2010
Emilio Ortu Lieto is an Italian artist who has over the last 5 years or so produced a number of art tarots in small editions:- Tarocchi Metafisici, Tarocchi Gay Orsi and Tarocchi Sardi. His latest deck is his Tarocchi Surrealisti.
He is a Set and Costume designer for stage and screen, and has worked on many well known Theatrical productions and films. www.perunteatroteatrale.com/index.html
I just bought a copy from a well known Italian tarot dealer. It is not inexpensive at 100 Euros or so but I am sure these will appreciate in value as his art becomes recognised more widely. They will not be around long as the edition is limited to only 30 copies.
19 August 2010
I have not been very active on this weblog for a month or so. Not that I have a lack of material, there is quite a large pile of recently acquired tarots to work through, but I have diverted much of my time into writing one of my study courses on alchemy. Anyway here is a recent issue from Beth Seilonen (not her most recent that is in the post). Here we have the Blue Dart Frog Arcana: The Life of Balthazar a 22 card deck of watercolour paintings issued as an edition of 50. There are only a few frog tarots and this one is neat.
2 August 2010
I have now reworked my study course on the artwork of modern tarot and made it available as a download from the Internet. This means I no longer have to send out the course on a CD-Rom, and it also means that customers can have access to the course realtively quickly. It takes about 20 minutes to half an hour to download. This means I can reduce the price as I no longer have to print out the CD-Rom, make up the case, and pay for the packaging and postage so I have been able to reduce the price considerably. I also now allow payment in Euros, as well as Pounds and Dollars. It is only available for Windows at present - not for Macs!
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Click to buy my Study Course on the Artwork of Modern Tarot. |
I have begun making up the final batch of copies of the Sylph Tarot. These should be ready for sale next week. This is a beautifully drawn tarot based on the images of butterflies. When I first issued it, to save time, I only made up half of the edition of 100. These sold out a while ago and I could not find time to print out the final 50 as I was working on new tarots. Now the new tarots are abandoned I can catch up on some of the back list.
23 July 2010
Marco Iannaccone is a photographer in Naples. He has recently issued a tarot deck using his photographs. The deck incorporates black and white, coloured and some with areas in colour. These are not collaged, but for the most part are posed photographs. Being an art photographer we expect some intresting takes on tarot imagery. One which struck me was the Wheel of Fortune which shows an execution scene with a revolver the twelve chambers of which are empty except for one with a bullet. He only made a few copies and sold some recently on Ebay.
21 July 2010
I recently got a copy of the Orgasm Tarot from Japan. It seems to be produced by an erotic manga artist/publisher called Koh Soramoto. I must say I found this very amusing and not at all erotic. The artist is totally obsessed with large breasts. Every figure in the tarot is depicted with such large breasts as to be ridiculous. It is obviously a parody probably referencing images from well known mangas. This is well worth buying, if you can find it, as a novelty. It was self-published as a doujinshi in 2005 so may now be difficult to source. This is the sort of novelty tarot that will appreciate in value once it is impossible to find. Don't pass up any opportunity to buy this.
19 July 2010
The other cat tarot that I bought recently is a self-published item from Japan entitled the Black Cat Tarot. I am not sure why it has that title as the cats are not black. Anyway it is a rather sweet childrens deck. It could be rather difficult to find.
16 July 2010
It is not often that one gets two cat tarots in one days post. The Toro Inoue Tarot are rather well produced cards published by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. Toro Inoue is also known as the Sony cat, as this cat who wishes to be human, is Sony's mascot in Japan. It first appeared in July 1999 as the main character in the video game Doko Demo Issyo. Now, after over ten years this cat appears in a tarot deck. If I have time I will post up details about the other cat tarot tomorrow.
6 July 2010
The Petrak Tarot is wonderfully painted in soft interpenetrating layers of colour by Austrian artist Petra Reiter. It is printed by Paitnik. The imgery is very creative with some ideas I have not seen before. The Hanged Man, for example is shown emerging upside down from a chrysalis structure hanging from a tree, much like a butterfly. It is not easy to source this tarot, but you should be able to find them through Roderick Somerville. Petra Reiter has a website at www.petrak.at where you can see some of her other paintings.
