Here is our Fool!

Here is our Fool, taking the first step in the Journey.

He is our:

Dreamer

Seeker

Wanderer

Free-spirit

Boundary Crosser

Rule Breaker

Risk Taker

Keywords: Potential, Freedom, Instinct, Trust, Spontaneity, Playfulness, Optimism, Openness and Fearlessness.

He leaps into the archetypal world of the Trumps and into a new adventure.  The Journey starts with a leap of faith, telling the rational mind to stop being so overcautious, choosing change and life and the risk that comes with it, rather than the illusion of safety and security.  If you sit still, life and time still continues, whipping by you, leaving you behind.

But there is danger here.  The Tarot is all about dualities.  The Fool can be wisdom or madness, creation or destruction, flying or falling.  It’s all in the timing.

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The Fool Takes a Leap of Faith

“You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety.” — Abraham Maslow

And so we begin our journey with The Fool.  He is the leap of faith into the archetypal world of the Major Arcana, an optimistic, open and spontaneous soul ready to take a risk and follow his heart.  He looks up, not down at where he is walking, operating by insight rather than eyesight.  The sun is shining, it's a beautiful day and he has his trusty companion, a white dog in this particular card,  to keep him from falling off that ledge.  He's there on the edge with the potential to either fly or fall or just continue down the mountain on foot.  He's in the moment, poised for the decision.  

The Fool can be a trickster, Coyote, Bugs Bunny, the Pied Piper or Peter Pan, luring us away from reality, crossing the boundary line into fantasy, messing with our heads, and opening our minds.  He travels easily between the chaotic world of the unconscious and the ordered world of consciousness.  The Fool as Trickster prods us from complacency, urging us on to life where the thinking mind may urge caution.  

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The number associated with the Fool is zero, effectively freeing him from the numerical progression of the Major Arcana.  Zero is a very tricky number.  It is indivisible wholeness that occupies space and has the ability to turn 1 into 1 million....or back again to square one.  

Math Nerd Alert-Do Not Watch the video below unless you love math, but if you do, it will, like the Fool, mess with your head.  At 10:01 the Fool really makes an entrance- "The answer can be anything you want it to be, depending on the angle you come from.".  The Fool is No-thing, not fixed in any one place, but definitely not nothing.  

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What do you feel when you see The Fool?  Do you feel "Danger, Will Robinson!"?  Is that your gut telling you that or your more cautious logical mind, or is it even worse, your harsh inner critic?  Ask yourself what you fear and why.   The Fool is asking you to suspend that logical and rational part of your brain and really listen to your intuition. At some point, no risk, no reward.

“We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.” — Henry David Thoreau

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The Dreamers

Jim has always had wonderful flying dreams.  He jumps from tall buildings.  He rises up from the ground.  So, of course, flying figures have figured heavily in our work over the years, especially flying dreamers like the one featured in the paintings above.  Our Fool will be a dreamer and an optimist and a risk-taker, but his free spirit will also be in harmony with his animal instinct, which will tell him the right moment to make that leap of faith.  Timing is everything!

-Lynn Lemyre

Interested in learning more about the Tarot?  These are my favorite books right now:

Seventy-eight Degrees of Wisdom by Rachel Pollack

Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey by Sallie Nichols

Holistic Tarot: An Integrative Approach to Using Tarot for Personal Growth by Benebell Wen

The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination by Robert M. Place

Come join us on our archetypal journey into the Tarot!

We're making a Tarot Deck!

Why Tarot?

It goes without saying that Jim and I are very visual people.  I’m actually surprised that it took us this long to connect our paintings to the Tarot.   As strong believers in Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and the power of archetypes, our paintings consistently feature elements that we pull from that collective well into our own imagination and transfer to the canvas or panel.   We have always done this very instinctually, seldom consciously deciding to use an element because we wanted to symbolize something in particular, but rather letting the images flow naturally because they felt right.   Interpretation came later, after some distance from the creation of the piece, like a kind of dream analysis.

Our paintings share something in common with the tarot cards.  When people look at them they make connections based on who they are and what’s going on in their lives at that specific moment in time.   The combination and composition of the elements and objects in the painting trigger a need in people to make meaning.  This meaning is drawn not only from their personal experiences and who they are but also from that great well of shared experience – the collective unconscious.

When we’re successful, this creates connections between the viewer and the painting and us, the artists.  We have called this a dialog, not a monologue.  We’re not talking at you, telling you what the story is, we’re giving you a jumping off point to tell your story.

We’ve noticed for years that when couples have approached our paintings,  one person has one reaction and the other may have a totally different one – which of course sparks a dialog between them (and sometimes an argument) and then we also get pulled into the conversation.  Our response, if they are looking for arbitration, is always “you’re both right”.  Everything needs to be understood in context.

My interest in tarot has gone back years, to my early twenties – fascinated by the little stories in each of the minor arcana and the sometimes comforting and sometimes frightening images in the major arcana.  We have actually used the cards as painting prompts to get our imaginations activated, but we never thought to actually paint the cards themselves.

Into the Woods

We are making an intensive study of the cards in the Major Arcana, through our particular collaborative way of working, taking a trip in The Forest of Souls, a walk through the Tarot (as Rachel Pollack wrote about in her book of that title).  We invite you to join us in this journey by signing up for a special mailing list dealing just with this subject (sign up at the bottom of this post).  We will still be painting all sorts of paintings and commissions during this project as well, but this is a special project.

In general we plan to paint them in order, starting with The Fool, but we’ve already broken that rule and painted two that just felt so in tune with our past work that they seemed a good bridge to this project.

“Our actual knowledge of the unconscious . . . contains all aspects of human nature…light and dark, beautiful and ugly, good and evil” 

-Carl Jung Man and His Symbols

 Fortune telling is not for us.  We wouldn’t have the presumption to say we know or could know what the higher powers know. We see Tarot as a tool for self-knowledge.  The imagery can be a catalyst to reach and communicate with your unconscious, your deeper wisdom.  It is a non-verbal language, using pictures to access where words cannot reach.

And what is it trying to say to us?  It’s a visual vocabulary about the entirety of human existence condensed into 78 pictures. 

What we value

What we fear

What we celebrate

What we resist

56 of those cards deal with day-to-day ordinary existence.    22 deal with the big lessons in life; the experiences that change us, the major archetypes that interested Jung and Joseph Campbell – The Major Arcana.   We’re focusing on those 22 cards. 

So with the open heart and trust of The Fool, we start this journey.  Let’s see what we learn!

-Lynn Lemyre, May 31, 2016

Come join us on our archetypal journey into the Tarot!