Painting and Pixie - Storytelling with Tarot and Timespans
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alternate title “Pixie Smith and the problematic nature of fast new consumption of slow old ideas”
This post is a deeper dive from my quarterly ”tea room” style newsletter. Sign up to catch the next one!
It's weird to reflect on how long i've been 'blogging', 'content creating' and 'sharing online' since I can honestly say its been nearly twenty years. If you remember Get Crafty / Glitter / SuperNaturale, Site Fights, Live Journal, or any of the older kookier maker spaces online, you are my people! Conversations and other exchanges took days, sometimes weeks and months to read, research, reply, repeat… Flash forward to last year when I decided to start posting more regularly to this blog space on Premye. I want to check in here every few months and my content making in February helped me drill into something I didn't know I was wrestling with: the problematic nature of fast new consumption of old slow ideas. We now consume content in 15 seconds end to end, not the 15 minute bites over 15 week spans of my youth [lol] and that's starting not to sit well with me.
To the point: I posted about Pixie Smith, the 20th Century artist behind the most famous tarot deck ever, in February for Black History Month and it brought the “processing time vs consumption time” dilemma into sharper focus for me.
Some background: While I have collected and used tarot cards since my teens, I didn’t know who Pixie (aka Pamela Coleman Smith) was, and I didn't call myself self a witch six years ago. When I planned to post about Pixie as part of my Black history month observation on instagram, I was just happy to find ‘content’ that tied into so many things I like to share on that profile.
At first blush [aka about 30m of google searching and lightly delving into her direct work and work about her], I added a mental to do list of buying a book about her to dive into later, and was just happy with the idea of what I thought Pixie represented. While I'd immediately found writing calling her race into question, I felt that photos of her, and a book she'd written on Jamaican folklore were enough for me to 'read her as Black'. It wasn't until I shared my final post, and was called in to more evidence that Pixie more than likely wasn't Black, that I had a personal confrontation with the way I consume and reshare what I know.
The genesis, consumption, and new information I processed after posting about Pixie and her controversial presentation as a potentially mixed race person sat with me in a good way. I even updated the blog post I created celebrating Pixie with some of my “in progress processing” the same day I was called in to research more deeply. Long story short: I *still* claim Pixie as an honorary ancestor and am proud but relatively quiet about my witchy ways, and while a lot has changed in a relatively short time I still try to keep that long view lens of learning and evolving personally. This blog post, like most of my content isn't about race but isn't afraid to touch on it. I share my messy and slow evolutions around race and other issues here to remind us all that none of us knows the answers to these large social problems, and none of us should be afraid to stumble and learn as we aim to make things better in our lifetimes… Now to the heart of this post!
At the beginning of this year, I decided to start finally painting in the BOTA (Builders of the Adytium) tarot deck I had purchased years ago. I figured it'd be a cute thing to share with my newsletter folks via my blog, and it would get me practing my watercolor skills and dive deeper into the Major Arcana like I've been meaning to do. Y'all, I have been in love with and frustrated by water color since college, and I'm so happy that I finally found a way to explore the medium and give myself the grace to learn without expectations.
The deck itself wasn't as important as the ability to make it my own, even as BOTA has a really interesting history. But, if you know me you know I don't give as much personal time to exploring white male historical perspectives as I used to, prefering to spend slow time working on decolonizing and indigenizing. What I like about the deck is that it uses 'traditional' tarot symbology, per Pixie's original design, and I can meditate on those meanings and practice my watercoloring. The BOTA deck has a helpful ‘key’ that speaks on the themes and symbology of the deck so I can choose to use those directions down to the suggested colors, or I can play with color more freely.
The system was complicated but so fun to come up with and puzzle through! On January 1, 2021, I painted The Fool and the Ace of Swords as they are both associated with the Air element. I was supposed to color the next two cards approximately 4.7 days later, and continue in that sequence all year according to the recurring calendar invite I set for myself.
As a project manager by birth, my early plans for “how to color and share” involved (handwritten) spreadsheets, calendars and yes calculators as I puzzled through how to pace out a full year of hand-painting 78 cards. I tried a few systems since I didn’t want to simply work on them in order. This was despite the fact that the Major Arcana in particular is meant to be a progression of the first 21 cards. I settled on a complicated but logical-at-the-time system to paint cards in pairs, and aligned them based on elemental associations between the different suits. If you’re curious how I decided on alignments, check the references at the end of this post.
The system was complicated but so fun to come up with and puzzle through! On January 1, 2021, I painted The Fool and the Ace of Swords as they are both associated with the Air element. I was supposed to color the next two cards approximately 4.7 days later, and continue in that sequence all year according to the recurring calendar invite I set for myself.
Several days after I’d missed my own deadline, I realized where I’d gone wrong… Everything about my intent centered taking time to dive in and sit with the work of Tarot, watercolor and what they meant for me in the ways i wanted to evolve my storytelling comfort with those tools. Everything about my planning and execution was about bending logic and resources to fit into time constraints. Kind of like what happened during my crash course intro to Pixie, how people present, how we read them, and how we absorb, reformulate, and share information. For me, the ‘remedy’ was to compromise with myself: I’ll keep my schedule as a reminder of my overall timing goals. But I’ve happily abandoned the pairings I created in favor of letting the Major Arcana tell me a story, as it was intended to. I’ve now painted about 21 cards, 7 from the Major Arcana, and am only painting when I feel called to knowing that I have calendar reminders and up until the end of year to share what I feel is worthy of your time here on the blog. I’m planning to share my notes on the first few Major Arcana cards through Spring and will check in with the rest in my quarterly deep dive “Tea Room” newsletters. Sign up for the newsletter here.
References