THE PORTAL TAROT

Click Image for David's Site

David was pursuing a sense of himself through his artistic work with mandalas, totems and portals. For David “creative vision” or art, was a path toward internal freedom. Most of his work has been purposefully non-intellectual in an attempt to get to an intuitive experience or meaning. The Portal Tarot is one of the few times he has used a concept to shape the content of imagery. “In a way, I'm acknowledging that it is not an either/or between intellectualizing and intuitive experience, but that it is possible to integrate both.” David studied art and graduated from Sonoma University. He has traditionally earned his living by working in the computer field, however, to his great satisfaction for the last two years he has been able to devote full time to his art.

Four years ago, Traci’s life came crashing to a halt...she was diagnosed with bi-polar illness. As a consequence of this illness, she was forced to re-examine her life, priorities and goals and move forward in a way that collaborated with a illness left undiagnosed for too long. Being bi-polar has defined a large part of how she relates to and sees the world. As she pursues life, now medically stable, she often finds herself at odds with her perception of daily events versus the reality of them. She was drawn to Tarot because it's imagery “...spoke the ‘truth’ to me in a way that I could grasp and accept”. She began using Tarot in conjunction with cognitive therapy as a gateway to knowing her ‘true self’ rather than the one defined by her illness. In spite of the illnesses devastating impact on her life, she reports with pride that she studied both landscape architecture and urban planning and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a Bachelor of Arts after 11 years of struggle. The first in her family to do so. She worked her way through college in the non-profit sector as a grassroots organizer teaching low-income women living in housing communities how to design and grow their own organic vegetable gardens and in the private sector focusing on public relations, desktop publishing, marketing and proposal development for architectural firms and other professional agencies. Today, her work is herself.

Click Image for Traci's Site

Traci came across David’s art via the Internet and ‘saw’ the Major Arcana in his portal images. She wrote to him suggesting that they would make for a beautiful tarot deck; “a portal to self-awareness’, and he wrote back...and the Portal Tarot was born.