Shifting Styles: I’ve given up on consistency
Hello friends, I hope you’re all having a wonderful start to the new year, and a peaceful January.
This month, we had a new moon in Capricorn, among many other planetary movements, and it should encourage the pursuit of new projects, given the workaholic natures of the astrological sign. And while energetically the month was a little chaotic, I still tried to take advantage of this new moon by giving myself a deadline to complete illustrating a full deck of Lenormand cards (36-card cartomancy system). It was my way to kickstart my creativity for the new year.
As someone who can’t really sit still, I’m always looking for a new project during my off-time from work. In December, I needed one that had enough boundaries and limitations that I didn’t need too much brain space, yet gave me the excuse to creatively explore. Since Lenormand cards are illustrations of a single object, it became the perfect exercise for experimenting with digital illustration.
While painting and other analogue artmaking methods were an intuitive process that was tactile and grounding for me (even watercolour, with all of its flowy and spontaneous glory, was grounding), I’ve always struggled with finding the same tactility and intuition in digital painting.
And though I’m definitely far from being done with the project (it’s only the 12th of January at the time of writing this), the few friends who’ve seen the works came back with the same comment:
“You changed your style.”
Yet I was immediately thinking “I’ve never had one.”
The Four Seasons
Wrote little things about the first four paintings I made for my gallery debut.
XXI The World
Painted as a pairing with (and actually before) ‘0 The Fool’, ‘XXI The World.’ Like its partner, ‘XXI The World’ is a re-interpretation of the last card in a Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck. The first iteration I made of the card was mid-2019, in the middle of a social movement in Hong Kong that I’m sure has changed much of our perspectives on what happiness is. Coupled with the waves of the global pandemic, I used this exhibition opportunity at Alisan Fine Arts to create a The World that reflects what a perfect world looks to me now.
0 The Fool
‘0 The Fool’ is a re-interpretation of the first card in a Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck. I had painted another iteration of the card in April 2019, for my now published deck, ‘L'Œil de L'Âme Tarot.’ But as we all know, April 2019 was another time and place. So many things had changed in the past two years, that when Daphne King of Alisan Fine Arts asked me to make new works for the exhibition, I felt that I wanted to use the opportunity to create a The Fool that was more aligned with what I thought the card meant to me now.
