An Illustration project inspired by the Music of Chuck Berry, the tarot and mythology.
This is also a comment on the power that the bard has had on society over the millennia.
Here Elvis is is playing to a crowd at Ragnorok. (The end of the word.) The crowd are the restless dead whom have spent centuries in limbo. He has them entranced, and is gleefully ignorant of the doom he courts.
Medium: Pencil Sketch, Digital Colour and Ink.
This is also a comment on the power that the bard has had on society over the millennia.
Here Elvis is is playing to a crowd at Ragnorok. (The end of the word.) The crowd are the restless dead whom have spent centuries in limbo. He has them entranced, and is gleefully ignorant of the doom he courts.
Medium: Pencil Sketch, Digital Colour and Ink.
In French suited tarot decks, the Fool is typically made up as a jester or bard, an outsider whom still holds great influence over society. Furthermore bard or jester is a figure of power in the tarot, represented by the numeral 0, unlike all the other Arcana who are represented by roman numerals. In that way he is reminiscent of The greek Outsider God Dionysus. Whom was a diety of madness and passion and celebration, almost exclusively worshipped by women. In standing outside society he gains great insight into the hearts of man.
The numeral 0 representing nothing was a strange foreign concept in medieval europe as it was reintroduced from arabic mathematics, saved from the conquest of the greeks by the romans centuries before the dark ages.
Wikipedia states the following:
"The number 0 is a perfect significator for the Fool, as it can become anything when he reaches his destination as in the sense of 'joker's wild'. Zero plus anything equals the same thing. Zero times anything equals zero. Zero is nothing, a lack of hard substance, and as such it may reflect a non-issue or lack of cohesiveness for the subject at hand."
"The Fool is the spirit in search of experience The sun shining behind him represents the divine nature of the Fool's wisdom and exuberance, holy madness or 'crazy wisdom'. On his back are all the possessions he might need. In his hand there is a flower, showing his appreciation of beauty. He is frequently accompanied by a dog, sometimes seen as his animal desires, sometimes as the call of the "real world", nipping at his heels and distracting him. He is seemingly oblivious that he is walking toward a precipice, apparently about to step off. One of the keys to the card is the paradigm of the precipice, Zero and the sometimes represented oblivious Fool's near-step into the oblivion (The Void) of the jaws of a crocodile, for example, are all mutually informing polysemy within evocations of the iconography of The Fool. The staff is the offset and complement to the void and this in many traditions represents wisdom and renunciation, e.g. 'danda' (Sanskrit) of a Sanyassin, 'danda' (Sanskrit) is also a punctuation mark with the function analogous to a 'full-stop' which is appropriately termed a period in American English. The Fool is both the beginning and the end, neither and otherwise, betwixt and between, liminal."
The numeral 0 representing nothing was a strange foreign concept in medieval europe as it was reintroduced from arabic mathematics, saved from the conquest of the greeks by the romans centuries before the dark ages.
Wikipedia states the following:
"The number 0 is a perfect significator for the Fool, as it can become anything when he reaches his destination as in the sense of 'joker's wild'. Zero plus anything equals the same thing. Zero times anything equals zero. Zero is nothing, a lack of hard substance, and as such it may reflect a non-issue or lack of cohesiveness for the subject at hand."
"The Fool is the spirit in search of experience The sun shining behind him represents the divine nature of the Fool's wisdom and exuberance, holy madness or 'crazy wisdom'. On his back are all the possessions he might need. In his hand there is a flower, showing his appreciation of beauty. He is frequently accompanied by a dog, sometimes seen as his animal desires, sometimes as the call of the "real world", nipping at his heels and distracting him. He is seemingly oblivious that he is walking toward a precipice, apparently about to step off. One of the keys to the card is the paradigm of the precipice, Zero and the sometimes represented oblivious Fool's near-step into the oblivion (The Void) of the jaws of a crocodile, for example, are all mutually informing polysemy within evocations of the iconography of The Fool. The staff is the offset and complement to the void and this in many traditions represents wisdom and renunciation, e.g. 'danda' (Sanskrit) of a Sanyassin, 'danda' (Sanskrit) is also a punctuation mark with the function analogous to a 'full-stop' which is appropriately termed a period in American English. The Fool is both the beginning and the end, neither and otherwise, betwixt and between, liminal."
