Woah! I don't know what to make of this. Is this the top of the tower, are we peering down? It looks like a portal almost. It's very chaotic. Already liquid churning.
ITHELL COLQUHOUN: After I had completed the pack I saw some slides showing nebulae outer space and the birth of stars. These recalled my designs and confirmed my conviction of their cosmographic function.
It's a funny deck, as in it is her own, totally customised to her thought, and probably unusable by anyone who does not have the name Ithell Colquhoun.
plus I could rant about the shoddy job Fulgar press did with their outsourcing... maybe another time. Anyway, the cards in this edition are too large to shuffle and work with effectively. And Fulgar stiffed me on the Three of Swords ( again not a card I would like to see in spread for me, but a 77 card deck is an expensive waste of space ).
The Colquhoun tarot is "non-figurative" - it's based on a Golden Dawn theory about colours and their correspondences. The other cards are just what you'd expect from mixing enamel paints applied "automatically in the manner of the psycho-morphological movement in Surrealism".
I'm impressed you saw a top down view, did you do well at 'technical drawing' in school? "Liquid" - It's supposed to belong to the "fire" element, so big fail for Ithell there, she hasn't communicated that well! I see this card like a zoom in / another view of the Sun that can be seen in the top left of the Leonora Carrington rendition, which still retains some elements that I would expect of a "Tower" card.
She assigns the cards to one of 4 elements, according to some GD "Kabbalistic" schema ( I'm using the western occult spelling here to distinguish it from the Judaic discipline ) and The Tower belongs to the group that she calls "The Five Lords" ( the others are The Emperor, The Wheel, The Devil, The Sun, plus the Kings of each suit, which gets confusing because the suits are assigned to elements, so King of Cups is water & fire, which means that I suppose in the crafting system for my forthcoming roguelike dungeon crawler you'd end up with "steam" ) - so the sephiroth each have four 'colour scales' according to this theory, and the King Scale is what this card is composed of...
I mentioned that I judge decks by certain cards, so here is the Ace of wands, one of my yardsticks, as depicted by
Ithell Colquhoun - another "Fire" card:
edit: she fails my "Ace of wands" test, but my name isn't Ithell so what do I know...
edit: there is an expensive hardback that I suppose should get bundled into whatever I bequeath: "TARO AS COLOUR" - it's nice coffee table book with some recondite info