The Creativity Card
Medium: Originally Gouache on Cardstock, Printed and Foiled
Date: 2022
Project/Body of Work: Mayura Oracle Deck
A hand-painted oracle card created in response to the prompt of "creativity." The composition is divided into two panels, each set within an ornate carpet border, a lantern on a deep red field above, and an oil lamp on gold below.
The two images represent two distinct sources of illumination — the light of rational knowing and the inner light of imagination. The first might be the light of the hermit, the old man on the mountain. The second could belong to Scheherazade, to the world of A Thousand and One Nights.
Rather than being merely decorative, the carpet frame suggests a movable container. In the desert, the carpet is a kind of portable ground, a home that you can carry with you.
Notes written on the back of the original card read: illumination and imagination, Aladdin and the Old Man on the Mountain, The Desert Hermit, 1001 Nights.
In practice, this is the card in the deck that most directly represents the relationship between the two primary forces in my own creative work: the rational and the imaginative, the clarity of reason and the romance of story. That relationship is certainly not fixed. It moves toward integration (like the other cards in this series), but the state of the relationship continues to evolve.
Process Notes:
This card was created as part of the same vision card series as the others in this early set in a class organized around weekly life themes, with each prompt generating one or two painted responses. The prompt in this case was “creativity.”
Like the others in the series, the composition was built around a structural division between gold and white, a framework that was as much psychological as aesthetic. Each card in the series was an attempt to hold these two elements (white and gold, reason and imagination, masculine and feminine) in relationship rather than resolve the tension between them.
The carpet framing emerged from a convergence of references that were active at the time, including illuminated manuscript carpet pages, the role of the oriental carpet in the history of East-West cultural exchange, Freud's analytic couch and its own connection to the storytelling tradition of A Thousand and One Nights, and the fairy tale The Three Feathers, in which the most beautiful carpet is sought.
The original gouache card was later adapted into a printed and foiled card as part of the Mayura Oracle Deck, where it remains one of the central images in the system.
Process Images:
The original gouache painting for the card.
Field Notes
7/21/26:
A variation on the card was drawn and entered into the Inner Council Room while exploring The Mystic. See Note…
