artist's influences
“Imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”
— William Blake
deepening the influences:
doré, blake and a shared heritage
Before my years at the Royal Academy of London I felt an instinctive kinship with artists who refused to separate craftsmanship from conviction. Both Blake and Gustave Doré stood for an ideal that art was not an accessory to belief but its embodiment: a moral practice of seeing and showing. Their works are not just images but arguments — meditations on the visible as revelation. It was within that lineage that I found the logic for my own re-imagining of Pamela Colman Smith’s medieval-inspired tarot: one built not on novelty, but on renewal through fidelity.
Every artist works within a chain of inheritance. For me, influence has never been a matter of borrowing, but of recognition — the moment one finds one’s own restlessness reflected in another’s struggle. Blake’s spiritual defiance, his refusal to separate the sacred from the sensual, mirrored my own resistance to the cool detachment of conceptual orthodoxy. Doré’s architectural gravitas — his cathedrals of shadow and stone — offered a counterbalance: the intellect shaped through discipline and the patience of light.
The Christian iconography that both artists drew upon was never doctrine to me, but language — a visual theology of human striving. Their art, though separated by time, spoke the same dialect of faith and doubt: Doré’s penitent grandeur echoing Blake’s visionary blaze. In that tension — between illumination and structure, revelation and restraint — my own deck took shape.
William Blake:
visionary of faith and imagination
William Blake (1757–1827) trained at the Royal Academy of London from 1780 to 1784, studying the classical techniques that underpinned European art. Disenchanted by the Academy’s strictures—its emphasis on rational replication over spiritual insight—he departed early, choosing instead to forge a solitary path as poet-engraver and prophet.
His Christian faith lay at the heart of this rebellion: he perceived the Church’s institutional dogma as a constraint on true vision, yet he remained deeply invested in Scripture’s symbolic richness.
Blake’s illuminated books—Europe a Prophecy, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Jerusalem—recast biblical narratives through personal mythologies, using fluid, calligraphic lines and stark chiaroscuro to evoke the soul’s struggle between reason (Urizen) and creative fervour (Orc)
William Blake’s influence weaves seamlessly through the deck, evident in the interplay of figurative and symbolic elements. Like Blake, I sought emotional resonance through potent visual metaphors.
Blake’s expressive, often spiritual symbolism encouraged me to evoke deeper psychological and intellectual responses in the viewer, without relying solely on explicit meaning. His ability to capture profound emotional intensity inspired me to imbue my figures with palpable humanity.
I echo Blake’s emphasis on expressive gesture and emotional intensity: faces rendered with fine, arching brows; limbs poised between tension and release. Each figure carries a devotional weight—hand raised in benediction, a subtle halo of light around the head—reminding readers of the Tarot’s roots in Christian iconography and the medieval tradition of spiritual allegory
gustave doré: architect of divine drama
Gustave Doré was born on 6 January 1832 in Strasbourg, then part of France’s Alsace region. (1832–1883) He lived in an era of industrial upheaval and renewed interest in medievalism. His engravings for The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost and Don Quixote brought baroque grandeur to mass audiences, blending meticulous line-work with dramatic contrasts of light and shadow.
A devout Catholic, Doré viewed his art as a vehicle for moral and spiritual reflection—his deep blacks and glimmering highlights suggesting both the terrors of divine judgment and the promise of redemption.
In my Tribute Tarot, Doré’s influence appears in the architectural backdrops—vaulted arches, crumbling battlements—and in the sculptural modelling of each form. Shadows fall like carved relief, imbuing scenes with cathedral-like solemnity. I aim to evoke that same sense of sacred space: a card is not merely an image but a portal to a higher plane.
The interplay of divine light and human shadow unites his worldview with Smith’s medieval ambience—and with my own desire to honour Christian symbolism in a contemporary key.
weaving it all together
The marriage of Doré’s monumental architecture and Blake’s fevered intensity became the spine of the Tribute Tarot. Their shared gravity — one channelling the celestial through form, the other through flame — shaped my approach to image as moral balance. In my cards, Doré’s sense of weight grounds Blake’s visionary volatility: one reminds the hand of proportion, the other of purpose. That interplay became my discipline — to work within measure without forfeiting meaning.
Both men laboured as if each stroke were confession. They believed that art was not the record of vision but the means of reaching it. I found that same ethic indispensable while building this deck. Every adjustment, every redrawn line became a negotiation between spirit and accuracy — a task Doré would have recognised as architectural, and Blake as alchemical.
Yet influence alone remains inert without translation. My intention was never to mimic their language but to extend it — to let their grammar of faith and structure find its own inflection in a contemporary voice but one that in homage to Pamela Colman Smith.
The resulting images are not tributes but correspondences: Doré’s shadow lending scale to Blake’s flame; Blake’s fervour lending breath to Doré’s stillness.
The Tribute Tarot, in that sense, stands as a conversation across centuries between artists. Yet it is only one part of a larger body of work. Beneath the deck lies a wider practice — painting, sculpture, and conceptual experiments developed over many years — what I call The Well Beneath, the deeper ground from which this project emerged.
“What is now proved was once only imagined.”
— William Blake
↩︎ Return to Creating This Deck — where practice meets philosophy
↪︎ Continue to The Well Beneath — the deeper practice beneath the surface of the deck.