Yoav Ben-Dov
this is a reply to a question i was asked in another thread. as it is long, i put it separately. see here:
http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=163515&page=7
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so, what about the face expressions in the CBD cards - why did i do them different than the original?
i took some time to reply because i realized that for me, it is more complex than a simple professional question. for me the figures are not symbols of something outside the tarot: they are like living figures existing on their own. and as such, i have a complex emotional relationship with them.
on one level i feel that they are way beyond me, existing for centuries and touching the minds and hearts of millions of people.. so they can guide me, maybe i can serve them, but they are not mine. if anything, i am theirs. on another level, when i look on these tiny faces, i can see reflections of myself in them. it is i who put them in this world of strange landscapes and bizarre happenings. so i can feel that they are in a sense like my children. to accept, to care for, to love them as i do.
so why didn't i just copy the original expressions like i did in other details? this would be much simpler and easier. but i could not do it. i didn't want an exact copy which is a museum restoration to keep in a box like a dead object. i needed a deck which would be alive and that i could use with confidence in my own consultations and workshops. "confidence" means that i should not put my own interpretation in the details. so i didn't add objects or lines that i couldn't see in the original conver, unless i had a very good reason to do so (for example, a detail that would become too sharp and conspicuous in the modern printing techniques, so i had to soften it). i also tried to keep in this way the general features of the faces: same nose shape, same way to draw the eye in each figure, etc. but the expressions are the main feature that gives the emotional tone to the cards, and here i had a problem.
in the first stage of the process there was a person who drew for me the lines with ink on paper, and she did expressions similar to the original. but when i tried test prints with people in my workshops, to see how the drawings affect people in practice, they said the faces looked very gloomy and depressive. this is not the right emotion you want to have in a reading.. so, after the drawing were scanned, i asked the photoshop man who had an experience with comics drawing (so he knows about expressions) to lighten them up a little. but still it was not it.
and then i remembered a talk i had many years ago with a colleague of mine, who was a music historian. at that time there was a trend of "original instruments" - for example, playing bach on a harpsichord produced exactly like in the early 18th century. coming from physics, i thought this was a conceptually simple thing: just produce the same wavelength and amplitude with the same physical means, and that's it. but as she pointed out, the music experience is not just physics. even if you could teach someone to play exactly like 300 years ago (which is impossible, you don't have teachers with the same training and spirit), what about the ear (or actually the brain) of the listener? today you play to people accustomed from childhood to hearing a lot of music (records, radio, discs, youtube..) - there is music all over, and much of it is very different than 300 years ago. today's listener has heard modern music, indian music, electronic music, rock and pop music.. so the same physical sounds would create in him a completely different perception.
i realized that the same holds for face expressions in the cards. for example, look at old family pictures: even 70-80 years ago, you wouldn't see people smiling in portraits. today you see images of smiling people all over: personal photos, advertising, pr images.. and even in tarot reading you already saw many serene and relaxed faces in modern and new-age decks. so the same face expression which looked "normal" in the 18th century would create a completely different impression on you today. in this sense the past experience is irreproducible. you can reproduce a museum copy, but not a living experience.
so, i went back to the faces and modified them myself, going over them again and again, moving a little the eyes here and reshaping the mouth there, so as to have "the same person, but in a better mood". i did many test prints, tested them on other people and on myself, and tried to make them feel alive, expressing emotions but not too trivial. i am not a professional artist so i did it by feeling, like i was a cosmetician or a plastic surgeon working on someone's face until i feel he is satisfied. and when i felt that the figures look alive and like what i did for them, i released. so it was an evolution, not something planned in advance.
of course, your experience may vary. so i suggest the following experiment: there is an automatic 3-cards spread (from the 22 majors) on my webpage. there are short card explanations in hebrew, but better to turn them off by clicking on the little rectangle on the left. forget the card meaning and the correspondences that you know, just look on the figures: do they look alive? how are they relating to each other? what can you sense about their feelings?
http://bendov.info/heb/tarot/prisa/prisa.html
its a similar thing with the court cards (even more, because these are pure human figures, no mythology). but these you can see only separately in the gallery, unless you copy and paste them in a single image file, or if you have the physical cards in your hands.
http://www.bendov.info/tarot/cbd/gallery/index.html
well, this was long, but as i said it is a complex issue..
http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=163515&page=7
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
so, what about the face expressions in the CBD cards - why did i do them different than the original?
i took some time to reply because i realized that for me, it is more complex than a simple professional question. for me the figures are not symbols of something outside the tarot: they are like living figures existing on their own. and as such, i have a complex emotional relationship with them.
on one level i feel that they are way beyond me, existing for centuries and touching the minds and hearts of millions of people.. so they can guide me, maybe i can serve them, but they are not mine. if anything, i am theirs. on another level, when i look on these tiny faces, i can see reflections of myself in them. it is i who put them in this world of strange landscapes and bizarre happenings. so i can feel that they are in a sense like my children. to accept, to care for, to love them as i do.
so why didn't i just copy the original expressions like i did in other details? this would be much simpler and easier. but i could not do it. i didn't want an exact copy which is a museum restoration to keep in a box like a dead object. i needed a deck which would be alive and that i could use with confidence in my own consultations and workshops. "confidence" means that i should not put my own interpretation in the details. so i didn't add objects or lines that i couldn't see in the original conver, unless i had a very good reason to do so (for example, a detail that would become too sharp and conspicuous in the modern printing techniques, so i had to soften it). i also tried to keep in this way the general features of the faces: same nose shape, same way to draw the eye in each figure, etc. but the expressions are the main feature that gives the emotional tone to the cards, and here i had a problem.
in the first stage of the process there was a person who drew for me the lines with ink on paper, and she did expressions similar to the original. but when i tried test prints with people in my workshops, to see how the drawings affect people in practice, they said the faces looked very gloomy and depressive. this is not the right emotion you want to have in a reading.. so, after the drawing were scanned, i asked the photoshop man who had an experience with comics drawing (so he knows about expressions) to lighten them up a little. but still it was not it.
and then i remembered a talk i had many years ago with a colleague of mine, who was a music historian. at that time there was a trend of "original instruments" - for example, playing bach on a harpsichord produced exactly like in the early 18th century. coming from physics, i thought this was a conceptually simple thing: just produce the same wavelength and amplitude with the same physical means, and that's it. but as she pointed out, the music experience is not just physics. even if you could teach someone to play exactly like 300 years ago (which is impossible, you don't have teachers with the same training and spirit), what about the ear (or actually the brain) of the listener? today you play to people accustomed from childhood to hearing a lot of music (records, radio, discs, youtube..) - there is music all over, and much of it is very different than 300 years ago. today's listener has heard modern music, indian music, electronic music, rock and pop music.. so the same physical sounds would create in him a completely different perception.
i realized that the same holds for face expressions in the cards. for example, look at old family pictures: even 70-80 years ago, you wouldn't see people smiling in portraits. today you see images of smiling people all over: personal photos, advertising, pr images.. and even in tarot reading you already saw many serene and relaxed faces in modern and new-age decks. so the same face expression which looked "normal" in the 18th century would create a completely different impression on you today. in this sense the past experience is irreproducible. you can reproduce a museum copy, but not a living experience.
so, i went back to the faces and modified them myself, going over them again and again, moving a little the eyes here and reshaping the mouth there, so as to have "the same person, but in a better mood". i did many test prints, tested them on other people and on myself, and tried to make them feel alive, expressing emotions but not too trivial. i am not a professional artist so i did it by feeling, like i was a cosmetician or a plastic surgeon working on someone's face until i feel he is satisfied. and when i felt that the figures look alive and like what i did for them, i released. so it was an evolution, not something planned in advance.
of course, your experience may vary. so i suggest the following experiment: there is an automatic 3-cards spread (from the 22 majors) on my webpage. there are short card explanations in hebrew, but better to turn them off by clicking on the little rectangle on the left. forget the card meaning and the correspondences that you know, just look on the figures: do they look alive? how are they relating to each other? what can you sense about their feelings?
http://bendov.info/heb/tarot/prisa/prisa.html
its a similar thing with the court cards (even more, because these are pure human figures, no mythology). but these you can see only separately in the gallery, unless you copy and paste them in a single image file, or if you have the physical cards in your hands.
http://www.bendov.info/tarot/cbd/gallery/index.html
well, this was long, but as i said it is a complex issue..
