Over the moon with these new cards

July 11, 2019

Over the moon with these new cards

I don't know why it took me so many years to finally do this.

Anyone who has been to SAW or visited me knows that I am surrounded by pictures and index cards and use them often for in-class exercises and my own work. I've designed other decks too.. One, of intense, almost abstract 4-color process images (with John Hilgart ) and my favorite, an Oblique Strategy-style deck for comics, with instructions like "all alone in the panel" and "a language few can understand."

And being in a studio literally surrounded by images, and using online photo albums and random generators I don't know why it took me so long to curate and create a real-world deck of images for storytelling purposes.

Blank boxes, don't overdo it.

After the initial impulse, I threw myself into the project of curating 130 images into cards, and then 2 days later, ANOTHER 130 images into cards, and ordered both from Printers Studio.

And now they are here, OH MY GOD. I am OVER THE MOON!

The back image is from Abaas Kiorastami's The Traveler, a boy trying to focus an image as his peers look on (of course there's more to this image too, it's complicated.)

The purpose of this deck is to work with the subconscious, to find new combinations of old things to dream, write and draw about.

But sometimes the decks seems to like to show off.

For instance look at this:

This was the first pull for this blog post, a queen and a king, side by side.

Second pull for this blog post. A woman on the island cliffs, a woman tumbling. Stark black and white, vivid unreal color.

This triad from the first deck, Ishi cutting an elk carcass, Richard Dreyfus scraping a mountain of clay, and an anonymous man cutting Yoko Ono's clothes, is pretty startling too.