For the past four or five months I have been constructing these photo-collages. For the previous 3 months before that, I had challenged myself to write 78 haikus, one a night, for each of the 78 cards in the Tarot. Around half-way through this process, I had the thought that if I could illustrate these haikus, I had a potential publishable book on my hands. However, I had never considered myself much of a visual artist. I love writing and I love word-play.
I’ve always enjoyed playing around with Photoshop, teaching myself little tweaks to enhance pictures, etc. Perhaps I could utilize those skills and combine photographs in interesting ways. Perhaps even encourage friends to send me pictures of themselves that I could utilize for the central figure in each card. First though, I’d have to teach myself the form, try my hand at a few and see if they’d be any good. I started doing these photo-collages and I find them to be both fun and liberating. They seem to come through me rather than from me and even after I’ve completed one, I noticed elements in them that I hadn’t intended.
I enjoy playing with the combination of images and symbols. With every new person or event we encounter we gain the potential to enter a new world, discover a new state of being. Of course that is illusory for we all are different perspectives of the same existence. Different points of view as it were and when we enter a new state of being, as in one that incorporates new people, events and thoughts that weren’t there before what happens if not this shift in viewpoint, that entrance into a new world
I find that fascinating, the point at which two (or more) perspectives meet. There seems to be this rapid fire knowledge spurt that comes before enmity or love or fear can show up when our senses and spirits get bombarded by data emanated by someone or something that we had never conceived of before.
