Not even exaggerating, seeing these at his retrospective a few years ago made me start making art again: hilarious, angry, simple and direct.

Thanks so much!! Love your work!

This looks awesome, can't wait to read. Got into this stuff last year when I made an illustration to accompany a piece about Mr. & Mrs. Bridge and used some Veiled Prophet Ball imagery in it.

I used textures uncovered from a recent trip to the the Tenement Museum, styles and patterns popular from the period of Smith’s life, to tie them together.

#art #newyorkart #nycart #nycartist #collage #collageart #collageartist #graphicdesign #vintagedesign #vintageartwork #history @bsky.art

I was surprised and happy to draw Judgment since it strangely corresponds to more than a few things going on in my life. I incorporated lots of recurring symbols from esoteric and spiritualist art in the piece, and snippets from the work and life of Pamela Colman Smith.

Though she’s not a household name, Smith’s work lives on in the collections of the Whitney and Yale University, not to mention the bedrooms of every goth teenager on Earth.

...Bram Stoker (for whom she illustrated projects including the first edition of Lair of the White Worm), and many more.

I wanted to help resurrect Smith & her work a bit in this piece, and also reference other ideas & traditions from the golden age of the occult & spiritualism in which she lived.

Smith lived a singular life, mostly in London and Manchester, with stints in Brooklyn and Kingston, Jamaica. She was well known in the cultural circles of the time, acquainted with famous figures like Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keefe, Aleister Crowley...

The cards commonly used today are the “Rider–Waite deck”, named after the men who commissioned and printed the cards. The deck has stayed relevant, though, bc of its vibrant, fanciful illustrations by a woman of Jamaican descent named Pamela Colman Smith whose name has conveniently been left out.

The interpretations of each card change somewhat over the ages from deck to deck, from reader to reader, but the Judgement or Aeon card has stayed fairly consistent in its depiction of rebirth, resurrection, self realization, transformation.

I grew up thinking of tarot cards with about as much reverence as I have for Quija boards, but they have a long and fascinating past that reaches all the way back to the 15th century, spanning the history of medieval and esoteric art.