I began the Tarot images in the late 1970's because I had begun to feel that my vocabulary of archetypal forms--the uprush of imagery that had come in my work in the late 1950's on Harrison Street and in collage on Monte Vista in early 1960's--had become an empty repetition.  Subjective, personal, recondite, esoteric and incomprehensible to everyone else, the imagery was by now merely worn out shells for me.  I was teaching at Cal State San Jose, and a student had brought in some Tarot things she had made using oil pastel on paper, with the information and imagery coming from Douglas' book on the Tarot (I later bought a copy and thought it wasn't much, like I have thought of every other Tarot book except Stuart Kaplan's Encyclopedia of the Tarot).  I was thinking my work had become the product of a stale subjectivity, and here was the opening into an objective archetypal system, one I could explore as a way beyond the limitations of my ego and the tedium of its life.

I remembered Jean's Tarot deck that I had not looked at since the early 1950's, got the deck out and decided to get serious.  (I also thought that I should look into other objective archetypal systems, particularly astrology.  I went to the Achenbach Foundation at the Legion of Honor, talked to Robert Johnson, the Curator, looked at some old prints but could find nothing that started my juice.)  I began by making slides of the entire major arcana with the thought of projecting and painting from them the way I had my travel slides of the early 1970's.  It turned out that I had underexposed the slides so seriously that the projections were barely visible in my studio.  So, I put the projector on a high ladder above my drawing board, projected the image onto a piece of white paper--I could barely make out the outlines--and improvised.  The result was a series of drawings, two cards of the major arcana on each sheet, eleven sheets for twenty two cards.  Plus a couple of extras, drawing with watercolor wash, one for each suit of the minor arcana, another for the stave and sword, another for the cup and coin, and a last one for what I think of as the purpose of it all, the Fool moving in a spiral through  the four suites (elements, seasons, stages of life) to the goal, the dancing woman of the World at the end (image #5 below).

The cards, the slides, the tools.
 

2.
The Tarot of the Italians,
Drawing 1.
 

That was fine, now on to the next stage of learning the images--to make a linoleum block of each card of the Major Arcana, a block for the Ace of each suit of the Minor Arcana, and some miscellaneous images that came to mind--like the grass of human life and the scorpion of sex--as I went along.  The plan was to make one block at a time and to use it in every possible way that I could imagine with itself and then with any blocks made of the previous cards before I made the next one.  This went on for a year or more.

1.
Undated early 1980.
The Kingdom.

5.
"All Together Now,"
Summer 1980.
When all the blocks were done, I made this as their sign.
Then, I began to print them over one another to see what new images might materialize.

6.
October 27, 1980.
"Rejoice, Ye Partakers of this sign."
 

Group 5 of the Tarot Block Prints, January-February 1981.