Judgment from the Tarot Series

2019
Acrylic on Canvas
40×30 inches

This painting is based on the Tarot card Judgment, which refers to a time of resurrection and awakening – a time in which one’s life comes to an absolute end, and in doing so, makes way for dynamic new beginnings. The Tarot deck has meaning for me as a primitive psychotherapy tool, a means to sort out and identify issues in all aspects of one’s life in order to work through to a resolution. When I painted this, my life was in upheaval after my divorce from a long and difficult marriage.

Typically, the Judgment card depicts the Christian Judgment Day, in which Christ returns to sort out the souls of the dead as the first event of the Apocalypse. Here, Judgment Day is shown as presided over by Baron Samedi (with his attributes of top hat and smoking a cigar), the Voodoo god spirit whose duty is to rule over the City of the Dead. He is portrayed as a skeleton and wields a scythe, as the figure of Death, to reap the souls of the rising dead below him. Flames rise with the souls to the plan view above of the City of the Dead, or as it is called in Voodoo tradition, the City of Camps. Overlying the center of the painting is the vèvè of Baron Samedi, the symbolic drawing utilized in Voodoo ritual to summon and communicate with his spirit. A faint central figure in the cross of the vèvè is meant to represent myself, or any person caught in the maelstrom of life change.