The Fool, from the Tarot Series

2019
Acrylic on Canvas
36×24 inches

The Fool card, the central figure of the Tarot deck, is a card of embarkment upon unlimited possibility. Typically depicted as a young male gazing at a flower on a sunny day and stepping off a cliff while hounded by a small dog, my painting is rather of a girl’s transition to womanhood. Fresh and brand-new, laden with beauty, innocence and clear mind, she is poised to take flight in the world. The flower she holds is in full bloom, a symbol of her ripeness to womanhood. Hidden and present dangers surround her – a flight of hornets, and the sun she blithely gazes towards contains a coral snake coiled as world serpent. These are the realities of the world she will enter. Her eyes see beyond the physical world into the deeper nature of her imminent metamorphosis.

I painted “The Fool” in a time of personal metamorphosis after my divorce from a 22-year marriage. It is a reflection on the nature of one’s choices in youth when one’s innocence and beliefs in the goodness of the world are unmarred by conflict and misadventure. It is simultaneously a self-portrait of my younger self, a reflection on my young daughter’s imminent womanhood, and a universal symbol of feminine adolescence about to experience change.