Tarot art experiment

[pyraxis]

I've been researching tarot symbology and art recently. I'm thinking about a Karnese interpretation, how it would work to use the tarot system as a vehicle for representing Karnese culture.

I did this sketch tonight as an experiment for the eight of swords, which would be a griff card. A story about a griff that may not fly. It's not finished, but I'm curious what people think.



Edit: slight update to the pic.

Comments

[tigerweave.livejournal.com]

Hey wow. Just a quick scan of my friends' page before I go to bed and I see this.

I find it confronting. Like really confronting. I read the eight of swords meaning and I realise why. Wow. Powerful. And powerfully interpreted in your piccie. j-t, I don't really understand the connection/interpretation of the Karnese culture, but I would love to know what you mean by that.

Verdigris wants to know what medium you used.

Hey there is a whole lot of symbology about broken feathers. That one underneath the other has its stem broken. Is that alluding to the symbology?

When I read cards for someone I just let the card itself speak. And what this one tells me is if only she could see or sense well enough to not hurt herself in the process, she could use the swords to cut the bindings.

Kewl ...

:-)

- Leonie

[pyraxis]

And what this one tells me is if only she could see or sense well enough to not hurt herself in the process, she could use the swords to cut the bindings.

Heh, I thought the same thing when I was watching her paint it, that the woman should just cut the ropes on the sword that's right there in front of her. Blindfold or not. She'd probably get cut less that way than if she tried to squeeze through without unbinding herself first, like the writing on the site said to do.

- Pyraxis

[tigerweave.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Inneresting interpretation of what she should do on that website. Like ... a bit um... boxed in, or not creative approach to the situation.

Or to unbind her ankles too and stand up and step over them.

[pyraxis]

I find it confronting. Like really confronting. I read the eight of swords meaning and I realise why. Wow. Powerful. And powerfully interpreted in your piccie.

Thank you. :)

It's digital matte painting. Wacom tablet and Photoshop.

The broken feather was supposed to mean not being able to fly. That's why the sky-coloured cloth that's unraveling too. But I just looked it up and in Native American culture it's come to mean flight and messages in the spirit world too. In Central America it might be related to Quetzlcoatl. I found one source that says an eagle feather that's stripped right up to the black tip and then the tip is broken and dangling represents a scout who has discovered a lot of enemies (smoke-blackened housetops).

j-t, I don't really understand the connection/interpretation of the Karnese culture, but I would love to know what you mean by that.

I want to make a cleaner bridge between Karn and the, what's it called? Collective unconscious here. I think that would communicate the ideas a lot better than trying to translate everything into words. I've been getting screwed up a lot because I know how to make a piece of art appeal to one person, but not to people as a whole, and then when it appeals to the one person I get too scared to show it to them because they'll ask lots of questions that will hurt. So then it's like you said to me once, I don't show my art to very many people, and that's why it's not popular or successful. I have to fix that.

- j-t