19 – The Sun
The Sun is a card of untroubled simplicity and innocence, often represented by a naked child riding a horse. The rays of the Sun fill the sky and touch a horizon of sunflowers. It is the antithesis of the Moon, illuminating the world with a pure, joyful light under which all is revealed.
My initial design for this card stayed close to the traditional imagery, but after I completed it, I rejected it as too superficial and cliché. My goal in creating this deck was to find a personal meaning in each card: symbols and imagery that stayed true to the card’s inherent energy while digging deeper and seeing the card from a new perspective. When an image becomes too familiar, we often cease to explore it further. It is in the unfamiliar that we search for meaning.
For my second attempt, I took the sunflowers from the traditional card and extrapolated from them.
Sunflowers turn toward the Sun, but so do all the plants and animals that thrive under its light, even if their response is not as dramatic or obvious. I built on that idea to arrive at an interpretation of the card that centered on the natural world rather than the human one.
This card is unique within the deck because it is more purely a photo collage than any of the others. Although the finished image still required a large amount of hand painting, it does not include a human figure and is more photorealistic than the other images in my Major Arcana. The plants were photographed at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, and the animals came from photos I took in Florida.
Touring the tropical greenhouse at the botanical garden, I was overwhelmed by the astonishing beauty of one of the flowering plants. In that moment, I felt a deep sense of wonder that nature had thrown so much sensory delight into the world and, at the same time, a profound sadness at its fragility. It struck me how much we take the abundant gifts of the natural world for granted without appreciating or treasuring their value. That sense of awe in the presence of nature’s miraculous diversity is what I wanted to portray in this card.
Each animal in this tableau represents a piece of my personal history interacting with the natural world and a story of coexistence. The iguana suns himself, exposed on the branch without fear. Fully mature, he is no longer vulnerable to predation from above, while his perch provides safety from below. The coral snake slides into the warm water, as comfortable there as he is on land. The turtle ventures onto a log to sun himself but will retreat into the water at the slightest hint of danger, despite his shell. Land crabs tunnel in the soft bank, their slow crumbling reshaping the course of the river. A frog waits on a leaf, unhidden for the moment.
In this image, as in nature, there are elements that are present but only revealed under close observation and clear light. They can only be seen if you look for them. That is the message of the Sun: it illuminates the world with its boundless energy. It is up to us to open our eyes and our minds to what it reveals.
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