Jotun tarot project

I designed two tarot cards for a deck put together by Raven Kaldera(author most notably for Urban Primitive, among others). It's a deck designed by various artists, and themed around the Jotun, the frost giants of Norse myth. Here's the Ten of Swords, which I finally scanned and cleaned up:



This illustrates a story I'd never read about. Odin punishes Loki by turning his youngest son Vali into a wolf, as Loki and his(third?) wife Sigyn are forced to watch him kill his older son Narvi.


And the Six of Wands...



This one shows the frost giant Mundilfari, known as "the turner of time" and father to Sol and Mani, standing triumphantly amidst the timeline.

I find it interesting that the two cards I ended up doing are essentially "Absolute Win" and "Absolute Fail". Hee.


Here's a link to Raven's page with most of the deck on it. I know he plans on printing the deck, but I haven't heard back yet on how widely. It would kind of awesome if I could order it into my bookstore. :D

Now, to finish my whiskey, smoke, and sleep.

PKD makes a mean brisket

+ Awoke from dreams about me barbecuing with Philip K. Dick and ever since, art has been on my mind.

+ I've been staring at de Kooning's paintings all day and seeing random amazing things in them. There's a huge separation in art, mostly in painting, where one end of it can almost only be appreciated in a gallery. Pollock, Basquiat, de Kooning, Kandinsky, Picasso, etc... you know what I'm talking about. And that has nothing to do with how intellectual they are, but it's really just a matter of size. The size of the painting, and the distance the viewer is from it. Look at every famous painter and look at their work. They're HUGE. Most of them are only as small as 70 square inches. So, the stimulus you receive by looking at a photo of a Jackson Pollock are very different, and limited, than seeing it on a wall... all 8 square feet of it.

So in a sense, this kind of art is limited due to its experiential demands, but that is also what makes them rare and special. I don't by any means think of Pollock's and de Kooning's and Basquiat's as superior art. I draw comic books, and have been moved immensely by simple black and white illustration. But they are different, for sure, and I think they're given more credence simply because they can only be experienced under specific circumstances(and usually in the midst of a clique mentality that can be nasty at times). And it also took me a while to actually appreciate art like that, even though we're constantly told to love it and consider them geniuses and mavericks.


+ Interesting article on the speculative death of photography.

+ this site will assuredly kill boredom in the workplace for a little while. Just click anytime you want to change colors.

+ coffee is brewing!