The Tarot Garden Library
About the Authors
Robin Ator is the founder of the amazing
art/animation/publishing firm of GlowInTheDark
Pictures. His professional credits include design,
animation, and direction for animated commercials and
several television series, such as The P.J.s and
Gary and Mike.
Dan Pelletier is the
co-owner of The Tarot Garden. An accomplished tarot reader
with over thirty years of experience, Dan has also
contributed to such publications as Aeclectic Tarot
and Body Mind Spirit magazine.
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Shining a Light on the Basics of Tarot's
Imagery:
A Tarot
Garden Interview with Robin Ator
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Dan: I'm not sure where to
begin. You've made food products dance and sing,
you have done animation work on movies and
television that even my friends who live in
caves have seen. But what I want to know is how,
when, and where, did a boy from Plentywood
Montana meet his first Tarot, and what happened?
Robin: Well, somewhere before my teens
a set of tarot cards entered the house. This was
in the mid-60's, in a tiny farm town in Montana.
It was probably my mom's doing. Dad, in his
monosyllabic way, taught me about geology with
rocks and a pointed hammer, and how to make
concrete set right. But Mom had a healthy
interest in things unusual and esoteric --
always bringing home library books on horse
evolution, or Helen of Troy, or Helena
Blavatsky, along with their main interest,
science fiction. Anyway, the RWS tarot deck
fascinated me. My little sisters ignored it, but
I thought it was beautiful. Still, at the time I
had only a passing interest in the actual use of
tarot. In fact, I learned poker with it. For me
it was all about the artwork.
My hometown is based on
wheat, oil, and cattle. The people there are
mostly Norse, Germanic and, of course, native
Indian. We're pragmatic and literal types in
general, with no real use for art or
esotericism. Maybe it's the climate. I remember
talking to one woman on a cattle ranch, who was
sad about how "there weren't ever going to be
any new cattle brands anymore, because they'd
all been thought up." Anyway, since I didn't fit
in, I learned early to just stack bales and keep
quiet about my interests. However, our county
library was surprisingly deep, for being in the
middle of the Great Plains. The people there
never seemed to mind me pawing through the
stacks in the back rooms and basements. The
smell of dusty books on a hot day brings it all
back. I was looking for art books, but that was
where I first ran across books on symbology and
Gnosticism, of the kind that would be important
later on.
I hitchhiked out of town
the day after graduation.Along with a bunch of
other interests like cave painting, tepee
designs and underground comic books, I mentally
filed tarot away, and took it all with me to art
school.
That was in Minneapolis,
my first big city. I had a vague idea of
becoming some sort of artist, perhaps a studio
painter or jewelry maker.It never worked out
that way.
The Magician from
the Ator Tarot
Knight of Pentacles from
the Ator Tarot
Death from
the Ator Tarot
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Dan: The
move to Minnesota must have caused
overwhelming culture shock. Did you
take your Tarot cards with you or did
you get a new deck once you were in
Minneapolis?
Robin:
Moving east to Minneapolis was
something of a culture shock: tall
buildings and concrete, new
neighborhoods to explore, rock and roll
shows, and school. But art school
turned out to be immense fun. Instead
of being the odd guy in a small town, I
was suddenly surrounded by hundreds of
people in a cosmopolitan art hive who
thought the same way I did, and I was
instantly at home, and in a fever to
get involved with every kind of art:
drawing, painting, printmaking,
jewelry, video, art history. Tarot was
nowhere on my radar then; there were
too many other things for the young
single guy to try out.
Eventually,
though, my scholarship ran out, and for
lack of anything really better to do I
put out my thumb again and traveled
through the west, and up and down the
coast. I landed in Oregon and studied
Japanese martial arts with some
friends. All the punching and kicking
was fun, but I loved the spiritual
aspects more. I studied all the
philosophical work I could find on "ki
meditation," Buddhism, and the Vedas. I
became a Theosophist and a Mason.
I also became a
mannequin sculptor for several years,
and went back to school, eventually
finishing a BFA in Printmaking and an
MFA in Painting, and became a drawing
instructor myself.
Tarot showed up
again: I met a guy who was very sure
that the real true tarot was made up of
eighty cards. He made three-dimensional
collages to create his 24 Keys, and
asked me to create the remaining 56
cards. I was happy to give it a try,
but drawing them turned out to be a
disaster. We could agree on so little.
Nothing came of his tarot, but the
months of discussion clarified matters
for me, certainly. Later it would dawn
on me that I could make my own tarot.
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Dan: Let's do a side trip
for a second. For many people,
Portland, Oregon is where Chuck
Palahniuk is from (perhaps they've read
his Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk
in Portland, Oregon and think they
know the town), or that it's north of
where Ken Kesey lived. Myself, I'm from
Portland... I grew up in 'Felony
Flats'. But let's tell it for the folks
at home. What year did you land in
Portland, what was it like after
Minneapolis? Where did a student of the
esoteric hang out?
Robin: I've been in Portland
for better than 25 years. I ran out of
money while hitchhiking, and had to
stop to get a job.
Something about the place keeps me
here. Good friends and colleagues, of
course, but there's more. It might be
that there's mountains in one
direction, an ocean in the other, and
rivers in the middle.... It could be
the thriving
activist/artist/writer/musician/filmmaker/hipster
community everywhere you look. (That's
our response to our police and the
lumber companies, which are both
poisonous. But Portland on the whole is
mostly friendly to the fringy and
wacko. We can judge our societies by
how accommodating they are to the ones
on the far edges of conformity.) It
might be because it's startlingly green
here when the sun shines, and a soberly
dignified purple/green/gray when it
(nearly always) rains, all courtesy of
the Pacific. For a guy from the Great
Plains there's something about rain,
ocean and big trees that seems like
treasure. 'Esotericism'? Life for me is
mostly about art. The 'esoteric'
organizations I've been with are
Shinshin Toitsu Aikido for their
intensive and practical Ki Training,
and the Blue Lodge and Scottish Rite
for their amazing library. Maybe you
could call my day job 'esoteric.' I
currently work for a commercial
animation studio drawing character
designs and making sculptures.
Dan: So here's a tricky
question: at this time of your life,
which came first -- serious
professional animation, or Tarot? Has
one influenced the other? And how did
you rediscovery of Tarot manifest
itself? Self awareness studies,
divination, art, or historical
purposes?
Robin: For me, animation came
before tarot. No question. Since I was
a kid watching Bugs Bunny annoy Elmer
Fudd I understood clearly that
animation was one of the world's great
art forms, encompassing not only
draftsmanship, color and composition,
but also movement, timing and
storytelling. Through animation,
virtually ALL the other branches of art
are combined into one new entity. All
the art forms you could mention can
find their place inside animation:
dance, sculpture, music, abstract
painting, theater... and animation can
be used to explain pretty much
anything. A language barrier is easily
leaped by a well-done moving image. I
could go on and on. The world gives lip
service to the greatness of animation
as a branch of artistic expression, but
few people really grasp the enormity
and potential of it.
I began digging
seriously into tarot again in the
mid-90's. Books on theosophy, history,
hermetics, gnosticism and
rosicrucianism kept referring to it. I
remembered my earlier experiences with
it, and something inside began in time
to demand that I study tarot. I was
used to that sort of thing. Handwriting
analysis had done that to me too, as
had art history, and symbology, and
animation studies before that. So I
read tarot cards, read books on them,
meditated on them, read for other
people... The tarot became another lens
on life for me. The motifs crept into
my artwork. It dawned on me that there
was no reason I couldn't draw my own
versions of the cards I was studying.
Parallel to this,
in 'real life,' I started working with
Flash software, which is usually used
for web advertising. Flash has a
drawing interface that I eventually
became comfortable with, and short
cartoon films began to appear. Some of
them starred a couple of blobby-nosed
little men in blue suits, named Stodgy
and Starchy.
These figures became the basis of
the Ator Tarot. I had just gotten the
notion of drawing a tarot deck at that
point, so I used them to do it. The
characters had a cheerful, earnest, yet
vaguely confused look that I liked. In
contrast to the disciplined drawings I
was making at work during the day,
these simplified card drawings were a
relaxing outlet, and tremendous fun.
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Dan: Personally, I love
Stodgy and Starchy. I like the eyes.
Tell me about how the International
Icon Tarot came about.
Robin The International Icon
Tarot resulted from a coincidence: a
period of time in which I was studying
tarot, and a period of time in which I
was pursuing a certain type of drawing.
I had been
working on drawing the human figure in
a very simplified way. I'd make a
drawing from the model, then draw the
drawing, then draw that drawing, and so
on. The idea was to make a picture that
was as simple, flat, and elemental as
possible. Eventually, instead of
drawing with a pencil, I'd draw by
cutting out shapes with a scissor or a
jigsaw, or by making shapes in
Illustrator.
Also, I was
working on an ad campaign for a
well-known pharmaceutical company,
designing characters for print and
animation that were based on the icons,
or 'isotypes', that are found in
airport signage, road signs and
restroom doors. The idea was that these
figures impart information to pretty
much anyone, transcending language
barriers. Tarot works in much the same
way: pictures and symbols conveying
meaning without words, or beyond words,
speaking directly to a deeper part of
us without the need for lengthy
explanations, waking up the intuition.
So, since I was
thinking about tarot day and night
anyway, I started seriously making
images based on the tarot.
It turned out to
be lots of fun. I used the compositions
in the Rider Waite - Smith tarot, since
that's my own favorite. Not only am I
deeply impressed with the compositions
and multiple-symbolic imagery; I love
the early 20th-century drawing style of
'Pixie' Smith. Much of the fun of
making the earliest 'icon' versions of
tarot images was the thrill I got from
seeing a successful 'translation' of
her old designs into simplified,
cleanly geometric forms.
I knew that many
other tarot users didn't particularly
care for the RWS tarot as it stood, for
many reasons. Some felt it was too
medieval-looking, too garishly colored
or too drab (depending on the edition),
too poorly drawn, too 'mystical' or
occult-looking, too sexist or too
Eurocentric. I saw that translating the
RWS into a 'postmodern' form preserved
all of its usefulness, and lost most of
the qualities that people said they
disliked. Potentially, a strong,
working tarot deck was possible, not
just a 'theme' deck or and art' deck.
That gave me the impetus to complete
the group of 22 Major Arcana.
I placed the Majors online. The
comments were generally favorable, with
many people asking where they could
find it. "Where are the Minors?" "Why
don't you finish the rest of the deck?"
I even received encouragement and
advice from a couple of well-known
tarot writers. I took the hint, and
finished the deck.
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Temperance from
the International Icon Tarot
Eight of Swords from
the International Icon Tarot
Happy Squirrel from
the International Icon Tarot
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Dan: What was the biggest
challenge in creating the International
Icon Tarot, and have the surmounting of
those obstacles planed a seed for
another deck?
Robin: The main obstacle to
the complete group of 78 images was
technical. Once I'd gotten the ideas
for how the International Icon Tarot
would eventually look, there was a
period of experimentation with the
process. I could make sketches of card
designs on paper, but I still needed to
figure out how to make the finished
pieces. The images seemed to want to
become simplified shapes, with clean
edges and flat, textureless color.
I started with
cutting out figures from painted sheets
of paper with a scissor, and pasting
the card images together. That seemed
to work all right, except for the
mechanical problems of uneven glue,
curling paper and brushmarks in the
paint.
Then I started
using an exacto knife to cut shapes
from spray-painted sheets of styrene
plastic. Plastic gave a much cleaner
edge than paper, and would lay down
flat. That worked pretty well, and I
did a number of pictures that way. I
even tried thin plywood. Still, what I
really wanted was precision: perfect
circles and straight lines, and I could
just barely achieve that by hand. Also,
I wanted a range of color that I
couldn't get from spray cans, and an
even application that I couldn't get
from a brush or roller.
I was about to go with airbrush, and
then I found the computer drawing
program Illustrator. It looked like it
might be the right answer. It took a
few frustrating months to learn, but
eventually it started to yield results
I liked, and that's where I began to
make real progress toward a cohesive
group of images. Also, it made copying
and scaling simple. Overall, it took
about two years to complete the art for
the deck.
As to whether the "surmounting of
those obstacles has planted the seed
for another deck:" I've been thinking
about the possibilities of a tarot
group done in sculpture, perhaps made
of colored clay, or cutouts of wood, or
assemblage inside wooden boxes, then
photographing the artwork to create the
cards. But I haven't done any of that,
at least yet. The first question is
whether it needs to be done. I think
the thing to keep in mind when doing
tarot cards is always to let the tarot
itself remain in control of the art. If
the art style or the artist's
personality becomes the star of the
show, with the tarot taking second
place, the deck and its usefulness are
compromised.
The tarot's use
is to stimulate insight, whether it's
through divination or meditation. It's
fairly easy to come up with possible
themes through which to re-interpret
the tarot. It's fun to think about. For
instance, how about a 'cowboy tarot',
in which the Two of Cups becomes a pair
of squaredancers? Or, maybe a 'circus
tarot', with the Magician/Bateleur
becoming a juggler or ringmaster? The
ideas are entertaining, but there's no
compelling reason to do either one,
because they don't address an actual
need. Simply morphing the tarot via a
given cultural lens can be very
interesting, but it doesn't necessarily
elevate the tarot or illuminate its
meanings.
Dan: There
was once a rumor, that the
International Icon Tarot would contain
79 as opposed to 78 cards. Any truth to
that?"
Robin:
Yes. The seventy-ninth card is a
tongue-in-cheek homage to The
Simpsons, the work of
local-artist-made-good Matt Groening.
It's a card called "The Happy
Squirrel."
Dan: So
The Happy Squirrel is included?
Robin: Yep. Tarot may be
serious stuff, but that's no reason not
to have some fun with it...!
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The Tarot Garden is proud to offer the
Ator Tarot and International Icon
Tarot in our online catalog. Click
here for more information.
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Sample Celtic Cross spread
using the International Icon
Tarot
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© Robin Ator and Dan
Pelletier
1 April 2004
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