Her Fig Tree Press website provides a lot of detail about her art training, extensive travels and life experience. I was so happy when Penelope (or Pen as we know her here) agreed to answer a few questions for us to help us understand a little bit more about her and how she came to create such a wonderful assortment of decks for us to explore.
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JM: I want to start by asking about your Mystic Rubaiyat deck which is based on the book The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám. Each card is really an illustration of a verse from the book. Can you tell us a bit about what that book has meant to you and how one can experience the book through using this deck?
PEN: I first came across an old print version of Edward FitzGerald’s creative translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in my teens, but I feel as though the words have been with me for as long as I can remember. My dad was fond of quoting pieces of verse – more often the kind of monologue (by performers like Stanley Holloway) heard in the old music halls – but I’m sure he recited lines from Omar too, especially the more profound ones such as... The Moving Finger writes, and having writ, Moves on... Like Shakespeare's writings, many lines are well known – 'in the air' so to speak – and can be picked up in all sorts of places and situations.
I was the sort of child who remembered verse easily and thought about things heard and overheard (like most children trying to make sense of the world, I guess), but because I loved rhyme and rhythms the poetry stayed with me to be absorbed and eventually (hopefully!) understood.
So the quatrains were familiar, and loving art as I did I sought out illustrated versions in second-hand bookshops. I discovered some of the most amazing artists from the golden age of fantasy illustration between the pages of Edward FitzGerald’s ‘translation’ – Edmund Dulac, René Bull, Frank Brangwyn to name just a few – and it was then that the impossible dream of creating something as beautiful for those same verses was born.
The illustrations took years to plan and paint, although I didn’t begin until studying art as a mature student, or work on them continually. The book was conceived with the idea of decorated doorways and windows on alternate pages. With a verse on the left hand (even numbered) pages and the illustration on the right (odd numbered), the central cut out part of the doorways between the two would frame (and partly conceal), first the image, then (when the page was turned), frame the verse. About halfway through I was advised that the project would never find a publisher as it was neither practical nor affordable.
I was always interested in metaphysics and comparative religion but only became fascinated by the tarot when researching for what was intended to be a pagan trilogy, written under the pen name of Nell Grey. I immediately saw similarities between the cards and their meanings and some of my completed illustrations. And so the project was recreated as The Mystic Rubáiyát – meditation cards featuring the seventy-five quatrains of the first edition.
I believe the deck to be very versatile – each verse is below its illustration so the two may be contemplated as one. I sometimes draw a single card very early in the morning before meditation, but the only real limit on their use is the imagination. A stage magician once bought a set to use in his act – I often wonder exactly what he does with them...!
JM: You’ve traveled quite extensively and to some very exotic places. Which of your travels do you think has most influenced your art and/or your connection to the Tarot?
PEN: That's a really difficult question, but I think the answer lies in the transformative effects of light. I've always been struck by how the Sun can magically turn even the most squalid scene into one of beauty, picking out and illuminating splashes of brilliant colour, such as washing on a line strung between two windows in a tenement alley, or a street market strewn with rubbish, boxes and damaged fruit when the traders are packing up to go home. All my earlier paintings of beach, street market and café life took the Sun's transformative magic as inspiration, and India was a huge influence because I saw paintings everywhere I looked. It was almost too much at times – all that beauty, but heartbreak too.
Studying and researching tarot history has tended to move the art towards symbolism, although The Liminal Tarot retains that love of light with a helping of personal symbolism – which leads fairly neatly to your next question...!
JM: The Liminal Tarot is your original 78-card Tarot interpretation inspired the classic Thoth deck, with great attention paid to the details of the minors. The images are so wonderfully vibrant. Each card is layered with meaning.
How did you create these beauties? Can you share a little about the process from first brushstroke to digital image?
PEN: It was Lady Frieda's paintings for The Thoth that helped to inspire the art of the majors, although I did rename Justice Adjustment. The meanings (of the minors at least), probably owe more to the RWS.
Paintings begin with ideas and sketches, usually all together in a book so I can find them again, because sometimes I leave them for many months, either to work on something else or because I feel things are not going as well as I'd like. For The Liminal, some figures were drawn from life (it helps to have understanding designers in the family!), and others from imagination. It's pretty much impossible to reconcile the sketch with the vision and often when I see the work after a fairly long break – I try to take it by surprise – it turns out to be better than I originally thought. I work each sketch up, then transfer it via tracing to watercolour paper. First colour washes tend to be lighter than the finished area – working with layers of thin acrylic paint in combination with watercolour means I can layer colours and washes fairly safely for the effect I'm after. When the paint's dry the images are defined where needed with Caran D'Ache watercolour pencils.
The paintings are scanned, then the RGB files are adjusted to allow for loss of colour and contrast when the colour profile is changed for the printer, and the borders and titles are added. I've written that in a single sentence, but it can take ages to reach a point where I'm fairly confident the colours will be fine.
JM: The Subliminal tarot is another thing entirely! I have to admit, at first glance I saw what appeared to be beautiful ink-blots. But a little closer inspection and there it is! Each card is a world. Images emerge from the depths and I am in awe at their intricacy and depth. Your use of colour is masterful, again with such vibrancy and intensity but never ever garish. (a pitfall so easy to fall into)
What is your relationship to colour?
PEN: Colour has always been a vital aspect of what I'm trying to achieve in a painting. The Subliminal Tarot presented special challenges with the colour working, as black ink was used to create the 24 randomly splashed, flicked and ink-run cards that were to be the starting points for the tarot images. To be honest, I don't usually think too much about colour when I'm actually painting – it's more of an instinctive thing then – but I realized early on with The Subliminal that I'd have to work really hard to build up enough colour over the monochrome shades to bring the work to life, yet allow the grey and black tones to show through and retain the forms they'd accidentally created, before defining them just enough to be visible but not too obvious. Hopefully it's a tarot of long term discovery – after all the time I've spent gazing and searching these shapes from the moment the ink was dry I'm still finding things in the finished cards I hadn't noticed before!
JM: I want to jump now to the Wild Green Chagallian Tarot where you combine a love of the work of Chagall with wild herbs and plants. They go together so beautifully. It’s so interesting that instead of using actual Chagall images, you created your own “Chagall-inspired” images. You must feel a very strong connection to him. What did the experience of doing this bring to you creatively?
PEN: It brought a wonderful freedom I hadn't experienced since art college! I'd always striven for a certain realism in my drawings and paintings, but beginning The Wild Green was as if Chagall himself had given me permission to let go and allow the tarot figures free rein to be and do as they pleased. And of course I got to spend lots of time immersed in his life and work – a joy.
JM: I share your feeling about so-called “weeds.” They so often make the most beautiful flowers in my garden!
Do you also have an interest in the medicinal properties of plants?
PEN: Oh yes! The Wild Green was conceived as a sort of mini herbal, and the Little White Booklet that comes with the cards goes into some detail as to the properties of the featured herbs. With the exception of Hemlock (which appears on the Death card and is deadly poisonous), they are nearly all safe to gather and use at home – with correct identification and the help of a good field guide and herbal – and I do. Many have been valued by our forebears as food or for teas, many for their medicinal value. Happily the old skills are being revived and this knowledge won't be lost.
JM: Is the Emperor’s hat red clover?
PEN: It's Greater Burdock, a wonderful tonic and blood purifier.
JM: You like to add an extra card or two to a deck from time to time don’t you?
PEN: They just ask to be added – Marc Chagall had to have his muse, Bella, The Puppetmaster of The Subliminal just appeared and insisted on being included and The Liminal Tarot seemed to need a threshold on the border between this world and that of the cards. I love trees and often meditate on one particular tree, hence the Threshold card.
A quote from Shakespeare on the Magician card (If this be magic, let it be an art... ) simply begged to be reversed for The Pen Tarot Artist card. And I do like to give extra value too.
JM: Now after all this amazing colour we have your beautiful deck “The Pen Tarot” which is basically black and white but with one splash of colour on each card. Again you display an interesting use of colour, but in a whole new way from your other decks.
All your work is very personal but The Pen Tarot feels even more so than the others. Is it? Is it possible you were doing a bit of “shadow work” here?
PEN: It is a very personal deck, but then I guess when one spends so much time thinking about and creating the drawings and paintings all the decks feel personal. It was the first actual tarot I created though, and some of the cards feature family members. My mother was the model for Temperance, my two daughters The Priestess/The Moon and The Star and my son-in-law is The Magician.
I've never done any deliberate shadow work, but now you mention it I think perhaps that The Subliminal Tarot could be a sort of subconscious (or subliminal!) working, with shadows yet waiting to be found. I still can't get over how the ink-splashed card that became the Daemon sat propped up on the table for weeks, and how I puzzled over the butterfly-like shape in the centre that had been very obvious from the beginning. It clearly symbolised Spirit, but although I could also see a sleeping woman (you'd think that would have been enough!), I felt the image needed more and could see no way to develop it. Then one morning I just glanced at it and there he was – my Daemon! I couldn't understand how I'd missed him...
JM: I have to ask, is The Artist card a self-portrait?
PEN: Well, I did draw it in the mirror, although I'm not sure it was ever a great likeness. If it was, it's hard to recognise myself now – I look far more like Temperance these days...
JM: Do you have any projects currently in progress?
PEN: Many unfinished projects to choose from, but nothing yet decided. I have sketches for at least two incomplete sets of tarot majors, and two children's picture books to illustrate, both written quite some time ago, before The Extremely Strange Story of Ermintrude Bold, the first children's picture book I published using Amazon's CreateSpace. I find that the time has to be right for these things, although I should probably just get on with it. Then there's The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and those doorways – still haunting me after all this time. I've begun to reformat some of the paintings with the intention of making a mock-up to see if a version with fewer images is at all practical and/or worth completing, or maybe just to have a very personal book to add to my Rubáiyát collection. Or perhaps, as has happened before, an odd inspiration will strike and I'll veer off in a stylistically new direction. Only time will tell.
JM: Pen, I want to thank you so much for your generosity and for taking the time to do this interview. Is there anything you would like to add?
PEN: Thank you, Joan - it's good to find a website that actively welcomes tarot creators. I don't think there's anything else.
all of Pen's decks can be seen on the Cult of Tarot List of Decks and of course at her website Fig Tree Press.
