Name: Ben Lenoir
Artist's Name: Stephanie Pui-Mun Law
Title: Shadowscapes Tarot
Found: One The Web at Shadowscapes Tarot

I originally encountered Stephanie's work on an online art community called DeviantART and immediately visited her website on the web because I was fascinated with her work. She completely changed my view on the tarot deck. I used to think that it was just cards but now I look at each of the 78 cards as a singular piece of art within a collective body. I have followed her work of this deck since she debuted the design for the first card "The Fool" (Shown on the left) since late 2004. I was originally interested in her style of painting because she was able to render very beautiful and accurate images with watercolors, but I became more interested as the deck developed. Her deck, which is still in progress, still remains a very cohesive body of work. Stephanie's style is somewhat reminiscent of Celtic artwork in the patterns that she inserts into the backgrounds or the common symbols of the minor arcana (Swords, Pentacles, Wands, and Cups). Each suit of the minor arcana is a collective body of work all in its own, they all have a common color scheme as well as the symbols. It is also amazing that most decks look the same portraying the aspect of a specific card the same, but she infuses her own style and symbolism into each card making it new and original. This body of work has inspired me to infuse meaning into things my own way and it will work out to be better because it is not a trite symbol that everyone uses to convey a certain meaning. I also have taken the fact that meanings for a common trait, emotion, or action vary on a more personal level than I originally thought, so with proper justification I could apply this way of thinking to my own art.

For my independent research on the current Natural/Synthetic project I am doing research on Carl Jung's theories as a psychologist. I am trying to illustrate the relationship of the connection between dreams as a synthetic situation in which your natural self/conscious is interjected. Jung has many interesting theories as to what dreams are experiences of and how they work and can be read. The most interesting to me is that he thinks on some level dreams are our way of connecting into the collective consciousness of the human race and "re-experiencing" another's thoughts or actions. He also talks about common symbols within dreams and how they affect the experiencer. I find all of this very helpful within my own investigation of what my dreams are and how they may be related to something more than myself. When we go to sleep are we tapping into this important resource of the human race or are these images and situations all just random firing of nerve cells that cause us to conjure up images of a synthetic situation?

Article: Carl Jung