It’s a bit late in the season but the Taurus card was released on Tuesday and it’s the first of the forest cards I did! Something you’ll notice is that each landtype has a certain scale. The swamps and forests and very zoomed in, the mountains are at some distance, islands are very zoomed out and the plains are yet to be revealed. So this has some similarities to the layout of the first swamp card, but I was interested in doing this as an opening in or out of the forest. Taurus is an earth sign ruled by Venus located in a very seasonally transitional point in the year in my region of the world, also marking the point between the spring equinox and summer solstice.
Taurus is one of the oldest signs, associated by Mesopotamians with the Bull of Heaven defeated and thrown up into the sky by Enkidu, and then later associated with a number of other sacred bulls in other cosmologies . Something that particularly stuck out to me was the fact that the sun used to rise through the constellation taurus during the vernal equinox but no longer does due to the gradual wobble of the earth on it’s axis, The idea of the sun rising between the horns is evocative and seemed appropriate for a sign marking a transition period.
Neo-Assyrian cylinder seal dated 883-612 B.C. though to depict Gilgamesh and Enkidu slaying the Bull of Heaven
While I don’t think they’re generally thought to be connected this imagery of the sun in the horns in my mind is also strongly associated with Hathor and Isis both commonly depicted with a headdress of horns with a solar disc positioned between them.
Film still from Kenneth Anger’s 1972 film Lucifer rising featuring Myriam Gibril as Isis
For most of these because I was trying to abstract away from visually literal representations the horns framing the rising sun here are just a crumbling stone arch creating a doubled opening in the clearing of the trees.
I want to take a minute here to talk about an artist I discovered while doing my research for this project, because by some coincidence he did an entire cycle of zodiac landscapes. Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911) was a Lithuanian symbolist painter who created an incredible body of work (musical compositions, paintings, poems and stories) despite dying at just 35.
I really can’t recommend his work enough, and I’m so glad I found out about him through working on this. I found him when I was already well into this project and was surprised to find interesting similarities between our interpretations like in the case of his Taurus piece and I’ll be talking about him more in the future with some of the other cards. I also came across a term for an artistic method he used in his work while reading an essay about him that puts into words something I attempted with a few of these card designs (including this one): “Animisation, a popular principle of Symbolism, in which natural forms, such as a mountain, a bell, a cloud, the tops of the trees, are painted so as to be reminiscent of human or animal forms”. Strangely enough some of his landscape associations with the signs even map onto the MtG land type alignments Maya chose for each.
Insight from Maya about the characteristics associated with Taurus included it’s generative qualities, association with fertilization and food (hence the fruit trees). Consequently the vibe I was going for in color and light was lush, calm, warm and decadent. You look out a portal as light passes in.
Anyway little roundup, I’ll update the inprnt shop with this months print shortly, Maya’s May books are open if you want to schedule a session, If you want to bid on the original painting you can find the auction here and today and everyday and for so many reasons fuck the government, FUND ABORTIONS.