Queen of Swords

shes telling it how she sees it- Its time to acknowledge and maybe even break your cycles. Don't get mad at her for telling you the truth. Know that she speaks from experience.

This is only the second card I pulled after the Fool! Crazy! I thought I only got major arcana at the beginning but now I recall after pulling and painting up Queenie here I decided to only paint major arcana so I asked the deck to only give me major arcana. That worked for the next 9 cards. Holy poop! Then the deck only gave me cards I had already painted, until I woke up and realized I should go back to minor arcana. At which point I got the Ace of Cups (spoiler-sorry)

Of course our heron here is a court card. And me. So we’ll leave it at that. Just tell me to shut up already and go back to my high mountain if you don’t want my advice, okay? And yes- I am middle aged. Writing this I’ll be 50 in December. I’m a Sagittarius for all you Astrology heads out there. (moon in Libra = bad poetry/good art, and Airies Rising = look out).

Anyway, the RWS court cards don’t give readers of the tarot a whole lot to go on. Of course, tarot has gone mainstream and there are so many amazing decks now, many of which have handed our queens and kings, knights, and pages, really fabulous symbols they didn’t have back when they were derived from Mamluk Turkish playing cards. When the King of coins was just a coin with doo-li-dads and royal what-nots. So being that I adore a good transformation symbol, I hung a cocoon off the pummel of her sword. And the moth raises up to see then become the moon. Our queen speaks of the cycles of the moon and the cycles of your life.

Told you I'd find a use for that blue heron I photographed! Her beak is a sword as well you know, good for the stabbing. And the landscape is a pic taken through the windshield at sunset as we drove through the Canadian Rockies. I almost painted her as a human, with her tongue as a sword. Maybe my next deck (insane laughter inserted here). My goal is to make every card a painting I would paint if I wasnt creating a deck. So this is one of my broken out frames. Later I edited it in photoshop to all be contained in the tarot ratio.

“Acknowledging Our Cycles” Oil on wood in upcycled frame.

17.5x48”