Peter Rosson ART

Billy (circa 1975)

2012-02-08T23:30:00.000-08:00

Origin(al) Works

Bill Williams, Gisela, Daisy & Lily Gardener (circa 1993)

2012-02-08T15:45:00.000-08:00

Citizen Portrait

Landscape (Circa, 1985)

2012-02-06T19:12:00.000-08:00

Mystical Landscape.

AIDS (1993)

2012-01-29T22:11:00.000-08:00

Transition Work - Disc to World Mandala

StarInLandscape (1989)

2012-01-29T21:53:00.000-08:00

Symbol

Water (1994)

2012-01-29T19:29:00.001-08:00

World Mandala

SerialKiller (1994)

2012-01-29T19:15:00.000-08:00

Transition Work - Disc to World Mandala

SendHelp (1994)

2012-01-24T12:13:00.000-08:00

World Mandala (period)

1986 Theft of Picasso's Weeping Woman

2011-12-27T17:19:00.000-08:00

Bums Rush

...soon then you will become impatient as lost souls do

you will think you hear someone calling

when it comes to that all you need do

is take a last look at the effigy collection

say farewell to friends you may have made among the graven

images

then walk as a human lemming would

out across the bay to where the ice is thinnest and let yourself

vanish.

-Michael Dransfield.

Did you ever hear about the theft of Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)? Artists were 'set up' for that crime. I was one of them.

I’ve spent years trying to tell this story. Referenced it in a few good paintings, but I wanted to write it; to in some way articulate the complicated and, indeed deadly, imbalance of power I've experienced since 1986. Earlier versions were obtuse, out of fear (some death threats are very real) or they read like I was some cool cultural commentator, which I’m not. I eventually remembered that I’m an artist and I should write like one.

After the painting was stolen from the gallery a ransom note was received demanding increased funding for the arts - prizes for young artists, in particular - by a group calling themselves the Australian Cultural Terrorists. There was much panic with threats to burn the painting... A week later it was returned, via a locker at Melbourne’s Spencer Street Station. I, along with several other artists were questioned, but no one was charged.

By 1989 multiple theories had surfaced. It was impossible to take most of them seriously, except one - How Insiders Stole our $2m Picasso, authored by Ashley Crawford and Jason Romney, appeared in the Melbourne Herald on January 10th 1989. No arrests were made - I've since learn't that exposing collusion is best left to extra(ordinary) ART - it did, however, confirm the story most often told.

Urban Myth

The story has it that a group of art world professionals - two of them well placed NGV employees, at least one dealer, an academic and a critic - stole the painting. Whether to have a forgery painted, embarrass the arts ministry or simply play a stupid eighties, hubris induced, prank, the subplot of this story has very little, if anything, to do with increased funding for artists.

The classist shadow of pluralism is rarely so ugly; feigning help for struggling artists in order to scapegoat them. This was a spectacle surely rooted in cultural hegemony, though I did not have the benefit of that clarity at the time.

Freedom of Information (FOI)

My studio was raided. Scary! But, like I said, there wasn’t the evidence to press charges. The damage to my reputation was another matter... A lot of people phoned the police with 'so called' information about my involvement and there were several signed statements pointing the finger. I engaged the Freedom of Information (FOI) Laws to clear my name.

The battle raged for a few years. I came close to having the names of the informants released. (Hard to believe, but we just about pulled it off). Key people resigned and, in the end, I stood, virtually alone, on the courthouse steps cutting a deal with the Victorian Police. The upshot, of which, allowed me to add a clarifying statement to my, by that time very large, file. In other words, "please read this before you question me on the latest terrorist attack".

There was some very cool media - Jeff Maslin's Suspicion, published in the Melbourne Age on August 20th 1988, for example - that offered a measure of safety and one day I woke up and that, apart from a few lingering threats, was that. It was over. Or so I thought...

Blacklisted

Nobody tells you that your black, they just don't get back to you. It takes about six months per approach to be sure and another six to process the disturbing contradictions and ultimate flat line. Ten dealers. Ten years. Melbourne and Sydney. A lot of money. I worked with many people that weren't affected, of course, but my later work is extra(ordinary) - only the top end will do.

If it wasn’t for the 1988 forgery scandal, I might have regrets. Was my implication in the theft to give me criminal form for those fake Fred Williams paintings? I never want to know the answer to that question. It’s not that anyone thinks I took the painting...please! The FOI action offended people who have influence with the commercial galleries, national and state institutions, journals and newspapers that would best exhibit, fund, write about and critique my work. I don't know why I was so surprised, people have been blacklisted for a lot less. This, quite simply, is what happens to artists who get uppity.

I had my burgeoning social power removed - permanently; as you can see my creative chops are still well in tact. The perpetrators, however, lost none; indeed they have an air of omnipotence since they got away with it. An example in point involves a Victorian academic who still brags: “I set Peter Rosson up for that Picasso theft. Ha. Ha. Ha.”

WARNING:

For some reason

I believed it was the artist’s job in society

to engage in a search for the truth of things

with the materials available.

I thought artists were in search of meaning

and a beautiful way of expressing this meaning or truth;

a unique addition to the society in which they lived –

an attempt at something;

not a sanctioned proof, declaration or decoration.

I thought that artists might even locate the comedy in life

as they lived the life of the Fool

and struggled toward the light.

I was wrong.

Reference List

Rosson, P, 2002, Angry Buddha. Unpublished.

Fig 1. Rosson P, 2000, King of Spades: Rosson ART Oracle, mixed media, held at R&B Creative Individual, Sydney.

FaceOfGod (1993)

2011-12-24T18:27:00.000-08:00

World Mandala

Blood (1994)

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World Mandala

ReadyToUseForART

2011-11-19T23:41:00.000-08:00

An essay introducing a cultural-commercial translation of contemporary art - featuring the work of Peter Rosson - on line at Integral World. Link here...

Fashion (1994)

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World Mandala

Women'sBusiness (1994)

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World Mandala

RossonOnJung

2011-11-06T09:01:00.000-08:00

The Face of God was selected for the front cover of the C.J. Jung Foundation Journal, New York, 2009.

AngryBuddhaArtist(s)

2011-11-03T00:02:00.000-07:00

Making wrong right

I say we both knew what we were doing and we were right to do it. - (Catherine, Terrence Rattigan's Winslow Boy).

Power is the business of the Angry Buddha (AB) artist. Creativity, in the service of liberation, is their practice. The job is to right a wrong. Integrity, the psychosocial gain.

The AB artist is looking for a creative alternative to a cultural problem. It begins with a story. Somewhere along the line they ran into an imbalance of power and, as a result, made an (r)evolutionary shift. Their focus moving from the personal (me) into the social (we) experience, which they began to address through a creative practice (innovation). It was like a 'peak experience' in that they were never quite the same again. They couldn’t go back to 'normal' life, as if to do so might mean a permanent split between body and mind, their intention and actions forever at odds. Instead they decided to have a go at making the wrong right.

Some already have the necessary skills while others develop their craft when faced with the injustice. Whichever, and this is the important point, the goal is to find a solution to the problem not make a good career move. Indeed there may be little natural gift for the AB practice they take on, but they don’t need to be the best they just need to be good enough to make a difference.

Peter and his r&b creative individual partner Sally had well developed skills when they began their project - he in visual art, she in marketing - but these practices were not enough to right the wrong they faced. They knew they had to write if they were to do, what they felt was needed, for the independent artist. So ten years were spent learning the craft - developing a palette, locating their written voice and learning to edit the personal trauma from their words.

This isn’t a big deal for the AB creative, they’ve long left their brilliant careers behind to 'let right be done'. But we’re talking years of social obscurity and the marginalization that goes with it, to develop the solution, articulate the message and create effective distribution. Subsequently they're not easily swayed by negative attacks upon their person, which allows them to take bigger risks - existential as well as creative - than most.

Angry Buddha tours can take decades. This is where the burgeoning integrity starts to reveal itself, for the faith, and its resolve, becomes stronger with every year the injustice remains unchecked. They fall from psychosocial grace just the same as everyone else, yet the peak experience - the ‘why I did this’ - remains the central mandala. Indeed the well-practiced search for solution, and the relative limits of their social situation combine to take the individual from self-focus into advanced contribution.

AB creativity isn’t the exclusive domain of artists, activists and writers. They know business, science, sales, coaching, teaching, research, law, sports, politics, engineering, teaching, mechanics, health, IT, sex work, parenting, administration, waiters, some read an excellent tarot card... Whatever they do, however, their creative practice tends to take an independent approach; the dominant culture just isn't with them. This is not to say that they’re separatists, indeed their job is not complete until the alternatives are woven into the existing social fabric. Only then is the power spread a little more evenly and those previously effected now, to some degree at least, liberated.

© 2009 Casper for Rosson ART.

Reference List

Rosson, P, 2002, Angry Buddha. Unpublished.

Fig 1. Rosson P, 2000, Soldier (Angry Buddha): Rosson Consciousness Narrative, mixed media, held at Rosson ART, Sydney.

WorldMandala, Geelong College

2011-08-07T16:42:00.001-07:00

World Mandala Excert

2011-07-11T19:34:00.000-07:00

Face of God

So, in my dream of THE FACE OF GOD we see the story of trauma unified; the century of photographed and documented horror makes a simple mandala.

It was quite a month, December/ January 1993, Sally was away working and I was home alone with Ripley our beautiful, crazy cat. The ‘circle in the square’ painting/ mandalas had run their course and the pixilated work had begun. There had been a chessboard-like intrusion into the stabilized circle in the square arrangement of the art that had lead to a series of experiments with this new event or pattern. Once the grid had become capable of supporting a secondary image, a mandala, which I had designed using photocopies of 16 X 16 grids as I sat upstairs between consultations at Back to Basics in Geelong, this painting resulted. It was the first pixilated or grid-patterned painting I had made, but for the enigmatic SERIAL KILLER that Sally had ‘arrested’ in front off and identified as the new a week before.

“What’s that?” She’d said, “That’s interesting, that’s not a circle inside a square any more, that’s something else entirely. I like it, oh yes, that’s new.” She dropped her bag to the floor finally. I was impressed, if she liked it that much then I might have done something interesting or useful, I’d thought to myself.

It too had been a 16 X 16-field or grid format, but the mandala had not yet appeared. Needless to say, the change from the circle in the square mandala design to a digital mandala was very exciting and opened the gate of speculation about what this change would lead to.

I had no idea at the time just what it was going to lead to.

THE FACE OF GOD was the first grid-based mandala/ painting that I created with the intent of placing photographic evidence of something into a mandala context – with all of the meaning that the mandala would confer to that subject of interest. It is interesting that I chose horror as the first 'issue of transformation'. Remember that this was during the after-math of viewing the famous Joe Campbell and Bill Moyers interview that had so effected my perception of life at that time. I had decided to embrace my horror, both the personal and the nightmare of history; what the hell – it was my job.

The mandala’s basic circle design had been made using indistinct or abstract images, these were squares cut out of the center of black and white photocopies of photographs of two ‘circle in the square’ mandala paintings, I DREAM and THE MAGICIANS TOOLS. These images are strange, and though they are repeated they don’t ever really give up a meaning themselves other than as substance or a sense of chaotic structure (or a field of data) contained within their squares of influence. I imagine that at the time I considered these squares to be very important, perhaps some sort of alchemical reference to dreams and magic? Or, then again, I could have been using them to symbolize some sort of psychic muck – some meaning way beyond the horror images that were to follow. I’d used them in SERIAL KILLER, and to this day I’m not certain what that picture means – beyond being the event that interrupted the ‘circle in the square’ series of “beacons”.

At this time in my life I was working at the outer-marker of my perceptions and it was often frightening to behold my interior. It’s virtually impossible to sustain such periods of creativity by the way, it’s too demanding. More speculation about inner states some other time – in GREAT NARCISSUS (Book four) or AB:

The images of absolute horror were placed inside the abstract pixilated circle and were then subsequently out-done, in so far as my ability to record my personal concept of horror at that time, by the outer pattern of text dryly reporting the aftermath of a nuclear war. It is horror squared, and yet also horror somewhat transformed by the bigger picture, (the whole picture or mandala), into what was to become a strange, severe, techno-snowflake image made of images – a redemptive (even a meditative yantra) motif or a unification of terrible parts into a beautiful multi-faceted mandala whole.

If you wish to examine the photographs used as the central zone of the mandala they present us with an outstanding display of the horrid. There are many dead people, after all, death and “after death” was always a subject of interest, but these characters are dead of The Holocaust and were cut from two very special books. The reason these books were important to me was because they were my first contact with the industrial scale disposal of humanity, or in another word, genocide. This is not to mention “the ill treatment and murder of the civilian population”, another fearful concept that had impacted on my pre-teen psyche.
I’d found these books in my grandparent’s library when I was a child, and my repeated reading of the blunt contemporary analysis within them as well as my gawking at the grainy black and white photographs of the inexplicable ill treatment and murder of people by other people was shocking, fascinating and became, over time, a guilt-ridden but obsessively re-visitable and secret appreciation of the true fate of mankind – it was as though a terrible secret or truth had been revealed to me.

The beast within was out before anyone bothered to explain to me that the magician of evil Mr. Adolph Hitler had done it all, (as if he were alone in the whole terrifying enterprise.) I saw myself in these images and in the accompanying dry reportage of these horrors, and I feel that I was slowly becoming aware of what the collective “we” were actually capable of, even as a child.

Some of the photographs in THE FACE OF GOD are those very same faded half-page photographs retained and hidden within the books for years after the loss of the library, however they were insufficient to fill all the available spaces. After these had been cut out of the books and placed within the mandala structure I realized that I needed more, similar material, to go with these images of almost unimaginable (personal) emotional impact. I needed images of the same order, images that veered from horror to pathos, from guilt to megalomania, pictures that articulated horror for both the viewer and for the mandala maker. I was literally shaking as I made this piece of art.

I already knew that to make a mandala was an act of redemption or healing. After all I had been making ‘circle in the square’ mandalas for the past four years. And although I was frightened at the same time as I was (unreasonably) elated by what I was doing, I was also aware that healing myself (and perhaps the viewer) of the horrors of aspects of our collective history was one of the goals of the project – no matter how fearful the images I was using were to me as I handled and used them. I wondered at the impact of the object in polite society.

I wondered, “What would people say?”

So now I was hunting for photographs that would hold the viewer in the spotlight of this extraordinary artwork and its devastating parts until they were transformed or shocked into a holistic way of seeing or viewing the subject being explored by the historical “fact” of the pieces and, at the same time, were effected by the simultaneous unification of these pieces into a mandala with its attendant belonging, redeeming and integrating qualities. It was exciting and terrifying.

“Is this art?” I asked the cat. “Well I’m making it and I’m an artist.” I replied, thinking that this enterprise did appear to have departed from certain learned notions of what art should be.

Yet finding the extra images was easy.

I had been collecting images for many years and I filled the vacant spaces with those that I felt were most compatible. If I’d had to commence the search that day it would have been an overwhelming task. But image collecting, tone matching and editing came to the fore.
Over the three days it took to construct this piece of art I don’t think I ever stopped to consider what I was doing – in terms of how acceptable such an artwork might be to those who decided such things – as far as I was concerned I was surfing the greatest 'peak' experience of my artistic life.

It never occurred to me that anyone could look away once they had seen this object. It also never occurred to me how long one would have to look at the object to actually see it all and thus sense the attempt at redemption and unification of our historical reality. In other words, I failed to notice that making it was by far the best method of seeing and experiencing it.
As we zoom into the squares we meet the demoralized, bewildered and exhausted soldier who had just crawled across a field of mud under a hail of fire from his terrified, panic-stricken companions and was snapped (by the omnipresent photographer) as he took a shaking drag on the proffered cigarette. (A soldier’s consolation in the field.) We look past a figure obscured in back-to-the-camera anonymity and notice an obscure Adolph Hitler preening and mugging for the mirror of the camera.

Whenever we see a historical scenario where a character is looking at you through the lens of a camera we are looking at a primitive species of immortality. It is as though the camera conferees a type of permanence to the photographed individual, whereas a labored oil portrait (for example) carts too much baggage for such simple speculations. The camera is image immortality and often the subject knows it in the moment. Any self-promoter knows what immediacy film is capable of.

I subsequently made a mandala from collected photographs of Adolph Hitler and called it HISTORY. There are a lot of photographs of this individual (or celebrity.) This World Mandala has only been seen by about five people and is, in some ways, even more terrifying than the present subject.

We see a dead man’s pistol lying just out of reach of his (unseen, edited-out) dead hand in the dirt. The clip is missing and the weapon is (and was) useless. We see someone holding a writhing pig in their arms as they are forced from their home by screaming soldiers. We only see the pig and arms but that’s the story. A blurry teenage boy runs in a sort of aimless jog past the camera and away from a burning European town. Two unarmed and defeated soldiers in a retreat column look down as an exhausted child is wheeled past them in a pram going in the opposite direction, it’s filled with the owners remaining belongings.

I’ll just make this point once more. Of course the viewer can see the pictures for themselves, but the artist sees more, knows the story and can extend the range of the image or whole part. The author/ artist/ editor/ mandala maker is telling a story that is in excess of the observable constituent parts because only he knows where the images were edited from – the actually historical location in the time line.

There are two dominant mask/ portraits, one a man and the other more central and evocative woman have their stories, both heroic and both murdered in the course of their adventures behind enemy lines. She having been tortured repeatedly and after a year of transportation, (where there was a poignant exchange between them on a prison train after they were captives), she was shot in the back of the head in Ravensbruick concentration camp only days before the war ended. He was tortured to death by the Gestapo. They had both been betrayed and captured as spies in occupied France during the Second World War. The books that were the source of these photographs had been recovered from the library of the artist’s childhood too. (These two photograph/ portraits had been taken for their fake ID papers in the same studio at the same time thus giving them a creepy similarity in their old graininess.)

There are three skulls. One has something of a story in that it was wired to the bonnet of General George Patten’s son’s jeep and was snapped by the photographer in Vietnam’s weird glades. It is easy to say that the skull is a mask, but it is also the mask flayed back to a common symbol. The skull is the revelation of just who it is we all are with our masks off in a materialistic world space. The other skulls are edited from the mountains of bones left piled across Cambodia’s killing fields.

A shrapnel-wounded and shocked Cambodian soldier seems to give up the struggle as he is shown his (out of shot) dead children and wife on his return from the nearby front where Pol Pott’s army has just closed the circle.

What twentieth century nightmare would be complete without a Hiroshima aftermath landscape? Like so many images of this incinerated city we can only wonder at being there as it slowly dawned on the survivors and the occupation forces that a sickness had come with this new fire that was not fore-told, (see the images of civilians haemorrhaging to death in stunned groups while sitting in the ash, pulling out their hair and screaming for water.) Radiation illness and the concept of a “half-life” heralded a longer-term global problem that would not be resolved by the end of the madness of total war, unconditional surrender and revenge.

A terrified old man, wearing a dapper bow tie, tries to walk away, (out of the photo and away from the gas chamber that is already his fate), with some dignity in one of the Eastern Ghettos. A laughing Nazi soldier, (smirking like a schoolboy for his friend holding the camera), is stalking him as though it’s all a big game.

Confused children and frightened adults with hands raised are marched out of the burning Warsaw Ghetto at gunpoint to the same toxic and bewildering death at Auschwitz. This stunning photograph is so commonly used in books about the Second World War as to be etched onto the consciousness of anyone with the remotest interest in history. To add even more to this image and it’s story we see one of the most terrible characters in the history of The Holocaust standing casually in the background looking smugly towards the camera as he holds his rifle. He was a guard that the few survivors remembered well enough to call Frankenstein.

There are a number of related photographic squares from the Vietnam horror story. We see the same old woman twice – in two different moments captured by the photographer traveling with a platoon, which having suffered terrible losses were in the photographer’s opinion now very dangerous, but might still be swayed from murder by the camera. The old woman looks down in one square as though dreaming or falling asleep and in the other she stands with her daughter who is holding her own frantic child and is shuddering in terror from screamed orders. Alas, the soldier nearby, (in another square, smoking and staring into the camera in the mist of the burning village), and his companions killed them all minutes later in a fit of frustration. I would like to emphasize that this was a rare occurrence in Vietnam, but this time it did happen and the photographer was there to silently witness the horror and helplessness of it.

We see a camera in the hands of a photographer aimed at us the viewers. The tortured and maimed bodies of the uniformless and naked innocent bystanders of horrible history are finally liberated from their long sleep in the musty coffins of old books. They beckon to memory and reason with the viewer’s cerebral cortex from their new mandala home.

Famine’s blank stone stare seems to query our indifference as it renders three men down to the same glass-eyed, gaping-mouthed masks and lays them out neatly in a row. A bureaucrat of the occupation (of who-ever and where-ever) confers with (unseen) colleagues, chubby-faced and serious about maintaining an efficient dispatch of orders from insane 'others', who are so removed as to be alien entities or Lucifer.

In the Balkans a group of prisoners grimly follow their orders to stab a group of captives to death, the camera is there as silent witness in high contrast, almost but not quite abstract, black and white. While in another square we see a group of young, uniformed, enthusiastic and grinning killers posing for the photographer with their trophies (severed heads) oblivious to the horror and paradox of their intermingled fate.

The captured, the wounded, the lost, dying and dead all dance in the tonal black and white matrix of the greater structure. Pathos and a sense of merger is introduced into the terrible clarity of the pieces of this mandala, or reflective universal mirror, through visual participation, editing and the search for meaning among these pieces – that are merging into a vast filmic and historical perception of human fate in extremis. The truth observes us with no judgmental accompaniment. The truth makes a mandala, self evident, self explanatory, self portrait.

We might eventually see spirits dancing in light space, all redeemed and living again in a new moment, a new structure or mandala of meaning, a new context or reformation of image/ parts into a new perception.

A healing is presented to us the viewers, a necessary redemption by the absorption and integration of terrible parts. A healing of the many is required according to the mandala maker who has clarified the issue by making the object as art, memory, action, story and presentation using the photographic evidence of that need for healing and unification. The evidence of the truth of our collective participation in history is recorded before us as we simultaneously gaze into a mandala made of pieces or parts of the same.

My first attempt at a mandala made from a subject of interest represented as images or image-parts results in a type of redemption, a mandala and a work of art. But this was only after I realized that the terrible, giddy and filmic attempt at a visual narrative/ art work/ mandala that is inclusive of my personal shock and the complicity of the collective to which I belong, (seen in the historical facts before us), had been organized into a symbol of perfection, unity and wholeness. I could not have done this work otherwise.

Each of the World Mandalas that use photographic images can be analysed this way, but as we move through the titles I shall focus on various other aspects of the mandalas that our attention can be drawn to.

We can interpret the World Mandala from many different perspectives. Each World Mandala is unique rather than a formula and is a reflective, multi-perspectival, multi-media, interactive painting as much as it is a mandala.

The rest of these stories are sketches or beginnings that attempt to view, using words, each chosen prime World Mandala from a different perspective. Ultimately I have designed these texts to appear along side high quality reproductions of the work to which they refer or even as texts that sit with the actual works in exhibition.

Copyright Peter Rosson. 1999.
WORLD MANDALA: PART SIX.

Angry Buddha Excert

2011-07-11T19:02:00.000-07:00

NIGGERS (The Dark Night of the Soul.)

Sally and I met in The Smith Street Bar and Bistro in 1988. For me it was love at first sight or something of that magnitude. But more about love later. We’re the niggers, OK?

Sally told me some time later that when her friend proposed she meet me and that I was an artist she’d replied, “Oh dear, not another one, not another artist. You're good though, right?” Within weeks she had bought a painting. In fact she’d wanted the best one at the exhibition preview she’d come to see, (Private View 7.) I’d told her it was already sold, so she bought the second best painting in the show. I was impressed. I just knew we’d end up married and in business together. She’d passed the audition, (buy a painting) and I suppose I’d passed it too.

She was a genius with visual imagery (and had met a lot of artists.) She could see or spot a certain type of culture like no one else I had ever encountered. It was as though she were a spotter... Though, at the time, she actually thought she wasn’t very smart. In fact, it emerged that she thought she was rather stupid. She’d been taught that.

I know I’m speeding up here, but that’s going to be a feature of this book – Right Brain/ Left Brain bilocation and (like the INTRODUCTION), an increasing presence of a second voice or ‘other’; a Casper commentary perhaps? But besides this other voice and the pretend theorizing it is just a story after all.

Sally and I were strongly attracted to one another and I suppose it was obvious to everyone. I didn’t care what anyone thought. Sally was a cut above anything I’d sensed before and she lived far away from the psychic sewer I’d been living in for most of my professional life. Sally knew things about love and care and she took responsibility for her life like a lover of animals, and she had wordlessly offered me passage to the magic mountain in the sustained moment our eyes had met on that fateful evening at the Smith Street Bar and Bistro.

Oh yes, there will also be a bit of an exploration of certain occult influences that permeate the story; these influences are present in all of our lives. Much of it is presented as metaphor – it is not obviously stated. Gasp – to continue…

The painting Sally had wanted, and the one she bought, was a thinly disguised portrait of a Gray, they don’t look as basic as the pathetic diagrams in all those books. Like most interesting looking things it’s a good idea to get an artist to describe them rather than a theorist, especially if the artist has seen one and maybe has some hand/ eye dexterity. OK then, they’re aspects of the authors consciousness – manifestations of the concept of ‘the other’. Or perhaps they’re special effects in human containment fields. Spooks. Thought-control operatives conducting a nasty experiment on a creative individual. Aliens. Paranoia. Fiction.

I had been sufficiently weakened by this point in proceedings to actually believe that I was under threat of attack and I was prepared for it. I also believed I was being slandered in some very skillful and holistic manner.

Have you noticed that the media want us to think the Grays all look identical. Well, I believe that the Grays are actually shape-shifting entities from the Devic Kingdom – not aliens from Hollywood (or where-ever.) I think that they’re very intelligent entities or presences, as opposed to the usual (and more childish) poltergeists, (some) elementals, (some) ghosts, pranksters, lower spirits and various other ghoulies and gremlins fucking about on (or in) the holo-deck.

Anyway, on this particular day I had turned up for an appointment with a dealer I’d known for years to discuss some interesting exhibition prospects and she wasn’t there. I returned to the studio and rang her at her office and she told me that she’d had me pencilled in her diary for the day before. This sort of mind-fuck was getting more and more intense during that final year in Melbourne, (before we withdrew to peaceful Torquay.)

I thought it might be Casper.

And what about the portraits of Casper, (I never exhibited these.) And where the hell was he anyway; had he gone for good? Had he finished his work? Perhaps you might consider Casper to be a part of me from here on – he’s still around somewhere.

History and the perplexing nature of the family unit: Sally and I were raised in households where the predominant factor of control and relationship was the dissociative, psychically jarring atmosphere of alcoholism. Sally wet the bed and I raised hell in an attempt to come to terms with this form of education when we were young. (This is a pretty common up bringing in Australian terms and reflects our society rather more than any individual family unit or gang.)

Then, in the grip of middle age, we both got away, only to realize that we were codependents in hundreds of disaster scenarios. We were not pleased at all. We lost all our friends. We were meant to meet. It was fate. Our combined perception of the world was to reveal many shocking truths.

The two of us had (by then) become professional tarot readers (for the money), avant-garde artists, developmental teachers and writers, and to discover one’s own codependence at this time was a bit like finding that one was under the control of a large unintelligent buffalo that was standing in the bathroom with a cloaking device and a channel changer tuned into us.

This is all about psychology, read the books, do the work. More about psychology later, it’s the greatest excuse for everything there is.

Ones family is not necessarily of ones choosing and I’m sure they feel the same way. To write any more on this subject would entail me entering a field of specialization I would rather avoid.

Now: We’re going to jump around in time a bit for a while, so don’t be alarmed.

After the fight for justice was over: (This is while I’m happily painting in my city studio and rattling home to the St Kilda gallery on the tram each night while reading the horoscopes.)

One of my former business partners had fled to America along with several other art scene personalities and on his return he called in to announce the end of our business relationship. He’d gone over to check out a gallery in New York with a dealer I’d introduced him to. I found out later that he’d ripped this dealer off and had got involved with some real creeps. The dealer held me responsible of course.

I didn’t go on that trip as I was short (of money) and had a show to put on. This show was Private View Six following fast on the trail of PV5, which had not sold well. By this time I was prepared to put on an exhibition (old or new works) every three months. When my former business partner came back it was as though he’d been replaced by someone else – another gnome trick.

Who are the gnomes again?

Intelligence community personnel moonlighting as societal debt collectors.

What?

Oh that’s so much clearer.

My business partner had been scared to death by something while he’d been away. In fact he’d never been the same since one of the meetings he’d had with the legal team that I had not attended. (I was unconscious – and as I’ve already mentioned, one of my legal representatives had turned out to be a gnome anyway.) This business partner liked getting involved in other people’s dramas, if not adding to them.

The legal team had quit the day before so I guess they’d told him why, and typically enough this associate of mine had not told me any of it. I believe they told him to stay out of it from now on, (as he was one of our character witnesses), and to try to get me to shut-up and let it go – that no one was going to put up with any more of this story coming out in the media.
Something serious had started to leak. Something might actually happen, “it’ll all come out.” (As I said, the news of my legal team’s withdrawal had plunged me into a drunken rage attack that had finally rendered me unconscious.) He didn’t pass that estimation of current events on either.

I had to hear it from someone else a year later as I was about to reopen the case. This particular legal expert had told me that if I did attempt to go back into The Administrative Appeals Tribunal at that time that the world was going to end. This prick told me that I was under threat and that he’d been compromised through knowing me. He virtually threatened to have me killed himself. This all happened in a coffee shop called Bobo’s near my studio, which had moved from the inner city space, (where I had spent six happy months painting the masks and devas), to the nearby inner suburb of Fitzroy; where the guys were always asking, “Where are the girls?”

I was so shaken by this meeting that I realized that I must have been under some sort of psychic attack.

More about the psychic and occult aspects of this drama later:

I wanted to reopen the case because I was as mad as hell; things were not going well at all. I remember one day particularly. This was after I had moved in with Sally after my three month horror stretch drinking whiskey and listening for cars with a loaded shotgun in the tin shed studio in the Anglesea bush. Anyway, I was attempting to get on with my art career in Melbourne.

(Yes, I know it’s hard to believe, but there I was.)

This horror stretch hiding in the bush was due to my financial collapse – as a result of the exhibition catastrophe in Sydney and the failures of PV5 and PV6 to sell – not to mention the avalanche of gloating threats I was subject to.

An associate of hers, who had first proposed the meeting and the ‘relationship’ with this particular gallery, (he seemed sympathetic and was a good friend of a friend at the time), bumped in to me a week later in the street as Sally and I were heading for a bar.

“Hello old friend.” He said rather sheepishly and then, when I asked him what was going on at the gallery, he told me he hoped I wouldn’t be in this situation in ten years. (Oh, I am!)

This pattern began to repeat itself. Of course I had the choice to not try anymore, but something kept me playing the game. I was curious if not a little confused and hurt. I had to see this for myself. I was stupid.

So I didn’t proceed with reopening the court case as I was living with Sally by then. What’s more, I realized how dangerous it might be – in fact I was too scared to even test it out once I realized that I would have zero support from anyone or anywhere. I was fucked – there was no justice.

Two years later the ‘messenger’ who’d freaked me out at Bobo’s was appointed to an amazing job. I read about his elevation in the local paper while we lived in Torquay. I was amazed beyond imagining. It seemed to me that hypocrisy knew no boundary.

I still remember his hypnotic snake-charming voice as he told me I was powerless while I stared out of Bobo’s windows at the beautiful cloud forms above the Dandenong Ranges, hardly believing what I was hearing.

Anyway, when this ex-partner returned from the States I was spending half my time at the St Kilda gallery and the rest of the time staying with friends or down at the studio in Anglesea. I was moving around a lot. I was really scared by now and the threats and harassment had become even worse as the media had published more stories about the legal battle and the theft of the painting.

I had controlled some of these stories to a certain extent and they usually ended with some sort of threat that more information was going to come out. At the end of one story I was quoted as saying that, “some day there will be a reckoning.”

After my business partner’s return, and after seeing that he obviously wasn’t himself, and worse, now had some ambitions to take over the St Kilda gallery because I was short of money, I realized that the shit wasn’t over yet. He had a suitcase with him that was full of compressed dope, a pistol and a pile of LSD blotters. Oh great, he was a drug dealer now! He was going to make big money. He was raving on about all of these connections he’d made, gunrunners, big-time drug dealers and big-time art people. Further, he claimed to know that the CIA were distributing cocaine all over the place that had been magically altered somehow to make it more addictive, he out-lined plots to wipe out parts of the population, heavy dudes he was hanging with rang him up at the gallery on my phone, (this was supposed to intimidate me I think), he detailed how vast amounts of money were being laundered through the art galleries he’d visited, and on and on he went.

After a few days of this shit I’d had enough and I threw him out. He’d been staying there like it was his place. It was probably just more bullshit and intimidation, but I could see that I was about to go everything alone from now on; everyone had gone crazy – and I suspected my house guest had developed a rather large drug habit while he was away.

I wished for Casper’s return, (this was an odd thought that did, never the less, repeat itself often.) He’d been right about the theft up in the studio the night I’d seen him in the hallway three years before. The place had been ransacked, but all that was missing was my camera and a dicta-phone. I’d wondered, during the early part of the legal drama, if this break in hadn’t been an attempt to plant incriminating evidence on the premises as a prelude to the police raid. After all, it was a perfect opportunity.

And the painting on the easel had been turned upside down on that occasion as well, this being symbolic of inversion and an occult “signal”.

Messages from America: After the exit of my ex-partner disturbing messages started turning up on my answering service and I found that I was being threatened from the other side of the world by a crack-dealer who seemed to be very angry with me. These calls had to be gnome stuff (I hoped) and certainly had something to do with the demeanor of my ex-partner. It was very upsetting and inconvenient. Perhaps they’d planned to launder some dirty money through my suddenly successful private art gallery in St Kilda? Of course, I would have been ‘replaced’. I began to prepare to retreat to the south coast where I’d found such comfort during the early eighties. The house in Anglesea had been sold (much to my disgust), but the studio was still there, waiting for me like a tin jail cell perched in a magical garden. A ‘friend’ offered to buy the block of land for me since I was broke by then, but I refused the offer.

Unfortunately there was a phone there too.

It wasn’t fair.

Now I was really, really scared. I got an illegal, short barreled, pump action shotgun sent down to me from a contact in Sydney sandwiched between two paintings. We used to send all sorts of stuff back and forth like this using art couriers; it was a good system. I applied for a shooters license twice and was ignored like I didn’t exist. I loaded the pump with goose-shot and slept with it by the mattress on the mezzanine floor above the entrance to the St Kilda gallery. If someone was going to try to drive me away, well OK, but if they were going to attack me physically I was going to kill them very much. That was if I didn’t just lean over it and thumb the trigger for old times sake.

One day there was a huge hailstorm: This was during my last days in the beautiful gallery I had been running in St Kilda since leaving the squash court gallery in horrible 1987 at the height of the legal battle. I used to call this place ‘the guided cage’, as it was a quarter of an old mansion, which included the ballroom, and this large room was the gallery. It looked like part of a palace. It was also a bunker – no back door, heavy grilled windows and no one could get in there without going through two security gates and being checked out at the door from above. And it had that great little bullet-proof cellar under the stairs where I kept all the exhibition stuff.

On that day a poet and I were getting drunk on the balcony. We noticed that the sky had turned green and that a major meteorological event was imminent. And as the hailstorm commenced and the street flooded Sally arrived as though it was time that we all knew that she and I were going to spend the rest of our lives together. She later told me that her car had just driven itself over there at the height of the deluge. A lot of strange stuff was happening at the time (for both of us.)

I could make an argument for the occasional celestial intervention at this time in my life – something had to put a break in the unending ‘peak experience’ of it all. I was like a main-lining adrenaline junkie by this time and it was no fun at all.

The poet was surprised: I lay in Sally’s lap like a cat and started to purr. We already knew a lot about each other, but the poet didn’t know anything about us at all. Sally and I were to shock a number of people before we were done with Melbourne. Years before I’d heard that the gnomes had machines that could change localized weather systems. During the card games I’d attended when I was an art dealer they, (the other art dealers), had loved talking about the powerful people they knew. They told us young fellows about the Bilderburgers and how the world was really run, but more about these speculations later. (It’s mostly mind control bullshit.) It was strange what thoughts were popping into my mind in those strange days.

I pretty much expected Casper to roll up at any moment most of the time now – like he’d just press the buzzer in the street – I really had to make an effort not to hold the loaded shotty up to the front door when someone did press it. I had bloody visions of blowing the post-man’s head off or killing a bunch of clients (who hadn’t made it clear they were buying.)

About two weeks after the storm Sally came over and we went out to dinner with two potential art buyers. After dinner we left the punters and retired to the St Kilda bunker to talk and drink. She asked me who I really was and I replied wryly that I was The Prince of Darkness. Not deterred in any way she asked me to a séance, adding that my name had been spelled out the day before requesting the pleasure of my company. The entity had said his name was Seth or Set, a fairly bad boy in the mythology books. I said, “No worries, let’s go kick some entity arse.”

Sally never seemed surprised when I talked about the psychic aspects of things and she let me rave on into the early mornings about how one conducted psychic war against supposedly occult forces that were being directed at you. I was a spotter after all, I was trained for this shit and I didn’t care two hoots for the enemy (whoever they were) – I regarded myself as being superior to them in every way.

I realized I was rather enamored of Sally and I wondered at fate’s timing. I’d figured that I must be pretty insane by this time, but she was quite reassuring.

We arrived at a closed café in Collingwood at about midnight, the bar next door was still open and I suggested a few more drinks before we went in. Standing at the bar were three people who were involved in the séance, they were all very excited and a bit scared. I’d never met any of them before.

I didn’t give a damn about the séance and figured it was some stunt to get me there. (I had considered that it might even be a set-up to do me in.) I was detecting low-level danger. I sensed something odd was going on. There was a “voice” nearby. Casper?

Someone or some big fat entity dude was manipulating these people towards some sort of out-come.

When we walked into the back room of the café I asked everyone in general if there was a beer to be had and they all just looked at me.

Oh well, lets get on with it, I thought, maybe I can nip this in the bud and get back to the bar before it shuts.

There were nine people: They were sitting round a big table with an up-ended glass sitting in the center and pieces of paper with letters and numbers written on them spread around the glass in a circle. As I looked at the faces of the group of people sitting there, (Sally had told me that this séance had been going on for over two weeks as we’d driven over from St Kilda), I suspected there was something very fishy going on.

One of them was acting as the MC, and she was talking to the dude in the glass as though it was necessary, she was making the introductions.

She was acting as the intermediary, but she wasn’t the ‘control’ or target individual for the big fat entity dude.

This was all wrong to start with.

“He’s here.” She said.

Several of the group leaned over the table and touched the glass and it immediately moved to say that I was the teacher, their teacher. I was impressed. This was definitely gnome stuff, I thought, as I wondered what time the bar next door closed. Cast in, establish susceptibility and then get the hook in. (Just like fishing.)

This fishing pun will become full-grown by the end of the book. Don’t tell me you’ve never sensed the ‘bait’ dangling in front of you. Sensed you were being offered something too good to be true perhaps? Sensed something odd or unusual? If this wasn’t a gnome ‘broadcast’ type of mind control (MK) deal then there was a whale of a big entity chucking its weight around in that room…

I didn’t know what the hook was yet and nor did I have a clue what I was doing there. (I guessed that I must be a lure or the bait.) So I asked the entity a few questions. The glass moved, answering yes and no. It was fast, almost instantaneous. I was sure that no one was pushing, (it moved much too fast), but something told me not to touch the glass; the ‘players’ were disappointed that I wouldn’t.

For the past two weeks the entity, Set or Seth, (it sure wasn’t Casper), had been telling these people that they were part of the new world that was being created and that they would all have very important jobs to do when the time came. The group were buying it and were starting to spiral off into obsessive notions about what was happening. Other people that they knew were becoming concerned, as was Sally, who sat back and watched the show unfold.

“Who are you?” I asked.

you know me

Why am I here?

your the teacher

Tell me the number of the house that I’m thinking of?

That’s not correct; tell me the number of the house behind the garden?

132

Who is Wanda?

…fghtyx

Cat got your tongue?

u r the teacher u know me

When…

c a s p e r died

What? Are you a gnome … from the garden?

behind the house 36

Wrong number, what can I do for you?

u r teacher …

The glass starts to plough through the paper letters and numbers and leaves the table for several seconds as though it’s stuck to the fingers on top of it and then comes to rest on the word yes. Several of the people leaning across the table are looking at me rather desperately. The MC asks me to touch the glass and I refuse, then she starts fussing the letters and number back into order.

Very clever, that was most interesting, but what can we all do for you? I said.

help me

We’ll need more information than that…
u help me yes r u b a x s a t e a c h

It started to plough again.

I asked the entity if it was a liar. The glass moved to yes and I lent over the table and turned it upright and told the group to stay away from liars. Sally and I got up and wandered back out into Smith Street. I suppose the nine players were surprised. I didn’t give a damn what happened next.

As you were leaving: Out in the street I saw Casper in a car that drove slowly past us, I smiled and he saluted me. Then I had to decide who I was going to go home with and I realized I didn’t have a home any more as I had run out of money. Sally, who lived next door above her pet shop, hung back. One of the players came out and thanked me for stopping the séance. I went home with an old friend I’d been staying with off and on as, by this time, I was in hiding when I wasn’t bunkered in the St Kilda gallery. Permanent anxiety had set in and was altering my thinking accordingly.

1998 State Survey Exhibition

2011-07-11T18:31:00.000-07:00

Rosson: White Man Landscape Experiment. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Curated by David Hansen.

Japan (1991)

2011-05-16T19:17:00.000-07:00

Disc Painting

Rosson TAROT game: collective wisdom

2010-04-30T22:07:00.000-07:00

With most things, the average is mediocrity. With decision making, its often excellence...it’s as if we’ve been programmed to be collectively smart. - James Surowiecki.

In a struggle to prevent the primal evil, known as The First, from taking over the world, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in the television series of the same name, sends her trusted watcher Giles and ex-demon pal Anya to consult the oracle, Beljoxa’s Eye. In an internal vortex they come face to face with this wise cracking, spherical creature made of multiple all-seeing eyes. They didn't get the answer they were looking for, which is the way with oracles, but they did find out why evil was all of a sudden winning the battle with good.

Attending the Rosson Tarot Game is a lot like consulting an oracle with multiple all-seeing eyes. Here is a group process that offers the individual access to a unique collective wisdom.

Created by artist Peter Rosson, the game was originally designed for our clients as ongoing personal development and as an alternative to the one on one consultation. Every Wednesday night, in 2001, six to eight people trekked up the stairs to our apartment over looking Bondi Beach. There, surrounded by Rosson’s futuristic disc paintings and mandalas we created our own internal vortex; a human circle with a deck of tarot cards at its center.
Everyone took turns at asking the group questions. Some rounds only one player would answer while during others everyone added their view, creating a rich space of diverse perspectives. It was a mix of light and pithy observations, with the odd wise crack thrown in to keep us all laughing. The game didn’t offer much in the way of future predictions, yet through its perceptive layers the root cause of many issues surfaced.

The Rosson Tarot Game is a rare portal onto the evil at work in our lives. It offers a greater understanding of the battle it wages with the good, along, I might add, with a few handy pointers on how to prevent a complete takeover.

Play the Game

Rosson’s game can be played with three or more people. You may use as many tarot decks as you like. Peter only ever used one per game. (This includes the ART Oracle (above image) - originally created, by Rosson, to play the game -featured on the r&b creative individual site, Street Muse blog and is featured in the digital art work the NEW (Moon) Project Development.

Each card, once selected and interpreted, is then placed in a central pile, or a few mini piles if there are lots of people and thus a large circle. They're not put back in the deck or reshuffled. The game officially ends when there are no cards left.

The first person, whomever you like, asks the person on their right or left, whichever way you want to go around, a question. That person then selects a card from the pack, not the person asking the question as is of course traditional, and answers them by interpreting the tarot image. A second or third may be selected, if more information is required. Once completed the answerer then asks the question and the person next to them does the answering and so on...all the way around the circle.

The first few rounds are played as quickly as possible so the game master has to move it along. Sometimes Peter would only give thirty seconds before he began tapping his finger. (Yes...it was very annoying). In the next few rounds everyone has a go at answering each players question so it takes awhile. A mixture of short and long rounds works well, keeping the game active with just the right amounts of depth and lightness.

Peter always began with a privacy statement. Such as, 'no personal information, revealed during the game, is to be repeated to anyone outside the group'.

The Prime Directive

'No answer is wrong or right'. Each participant simply adds his or her own view. The many unique perspectives becoming layers of meaning.
Any debate on the true interpretation of an image kills the oracles collective smarts. Influential people have a way of shaping consensus; it's unconscious, of course, however the natural hierarchy, which is at the heart of the game, must be preserved. The best answer is not always from the wealthiest or the prettiest or the one with the highest qualifications; quite often it is, but not always.

The Edit

The person receiving the information is solely responsible for editing any and all information they receive. It’s a process where the questioner sifts through the layers of meaning until a common and pertinent theme emerges. The advice to all recipients is to go home and let it sit for a while. Usually that which remains is right.

Profiling

The Tarot game encourages players to keep asking the same question in different ways. A process Peter referred to as 'profiling', in that thematic questions, asked and answered over consecutive rounds, hone in on the essentials of an issue. Aspects of the player’s psychosocial background – including the patterns of behavior that have and continue to shape our personal and professional lives – time to be outlined and in some way addressed.

Example:

Annie asked if she would work out the relationship with her family.

The first person answering – Jean – drew the Three of Swords. We were using the Mythic Tarot deck. She asked Annie if she had experienced some kind of betrayal. Annie confirmed and went on to tell the group how different she was to her mother and sister and how they, not liking this, had joined forces in an attempt to make her more like them
In the next round Annie asked, “will I ever get on with my family?”. (See how similar the question is to the first). Jean, who was still answering, selected The Hermit. She suggested that Annie take some time out, "a withdrawal might just do the trick", Jean said. “Give your family time to reflect on their behavior and see if they change their ways. If they don't then you might be better off without them”.

The next round Annie enquired about work. She wanted some insight on a disagreement she was having with her co-workers. Peter, who was answering, selected The Magician. “How’s the communication?”, he asked. Annie said there was often conflict. “They seem to misunderstand what I say”, she said. Peter then opened the question to the group. Jean, remembering the last question immediately asked, “how are the communications with your family?” Annie went silent for a minute then suddenly, as if recalling something long forgotten said, “that is how they have always locked me out! My mother and sister refuse to speak openly with me. I ask what is wrong and they say nothing. We don’t know what you’re talking about, they say. Clearly they are colluding in that they wink at each other and exchange knowing looks. Their tones are hostile, but they never confirm or deny their anger".

“Hey, that’s double bind communication. It can be so damaging, particularly if it began in childhood", said a psychologically informed player. "How have you coped all these years?" “My weapon is to disagree with everything they say and do”, said Annie. “I refuse to conform. That’s how I deal with all group disagreements. I set myself apart. I stop joining in. I remain completely independent to protect myself from gang-ups. It gets their backs up, though. I think they think, that I think I’m better than them. I don’t. Truth is I’m just scared.”
In one sessions Annie had herself a profile. Rosson’s group oracle had identified a destructive relational dynamic in her family of origin, one that was having an effect on contemporary relationships.

Bear in mind a profile is only a psychosocial sketch. It creates awareness of the issue it does not alter behavior, well not on its own anyway. As the player who finished the round suggested, “A psychotherapist, counselor or coach might be a good next step, if you want to explore your situation further and implement long-lasting changes.”

Developing Intuition

People will answer with yes and no. This is fine, in fact it’s hard to stop, but ask them how it all panned out the next time you play. There are enough answers that will be wrong (you said it would happen, but it didn't?) to give 'a hands on' warning of the perils of fortune telling and the dodgy fate of oracles. This encourages participants to reach deeper for their intuition, which naturally gives rise to impressions, metaphors, poetic phrases and story style interpretations. It goes to the heart of the query not just the surface question and a more therapeutic experience.

Shadow Work

Why ask a question if it cannot be answered? That’s simple. The magical mind (id) isn’t big on 'delaying gratification'. It wants what it wants and it wants it right now. The more outlandish the question we ask the closer we get to the shadow element. Pertinent themes emerge quickly, allowing the 'profiler' to hone in on the essentials of a persons situation.

Wrong Way Go Back

The odd participant might try and force their view on another. This is where things can get out of hand. They take out there own stuff, albeit mostly unconsciously, on a vulnerable person and give authorship of the attack to Spirit. The 'I am being told that you need to do this’, answer to a question. On the other hand, players are under a lot of pressure to come up with a response. It’s real easy to phrase an answer the wrong way or be accidentally opinionated. In other words, the intention is where the abusive element resides. Remain aware and any problem that crops up can be deftly enough dealt with.

More than one way to answer a question

Try these:

(All examples are with the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.)

1.The questioner doesn’t ask a question. The answerer selects a card and gives an unsolicited impression of the image.

Example: Player one player said, "you have everything you need to achieve your goals". The empress was the selected card. Once opened to the group, player two said, "its harvest time" while the sixth observed, "someone is being too generous". The silent questioner confirmed by mentioning her money troubles.

2. The question can only be answered with a story. This method demonstrates the power of metaphor, which, as I mentioned above, is indirect and much less interfering than the direct yes/no answer. It allows the questioner to be the author of their own solution; in their own way and at their own pace.

Example: A player asked, "will I make new friends?" The woman answering, selected the five of cups and said, "…an unhappy person is standing all alone focusing on loss. Yet all they have to do is cross the stream. It’s deep, but not very wide. And besides, she said, "I bet this person is a good swimmer. Now I can see them on the other side, standing outside there new home. Like-minded people live there…" The questioner connected with the story and spoke about her loneliness. How she became attached to people too quickly. "I suffocate them", she confessed. "Maybe when I cross the stream I will come to terms with that." Another player reminded her that the person new how to swim. "It might not take very long".

3. The question is to be answered in one sentence. It can be original or a saying, a line from a song or an adage of some kind.

Example: The question asked was, "will the man I am seeing turn out to be 'the one'?" A player selected the eight of pentacles and said "practice make perfect".

4. The answer is to be given in one word.

Example: A player asked "will I make any money this year". The card was judgment. "Transformation", the one word answer given. Later the lady who asked the question said, "I have always been something of a spend thrift. I know I need to change the way I deal with money." Another player asked if she would ever be happy?" "Independence" was the answer. The nine of pentacles was the card. She went on to tell us that she only ever felt happy when she was in a relationship. The answerer was thrilled to be of service. Coincidently, he had gone through a marriage breakup the year before. "I have only just begun to feel emotionally independent myself", he said.

5. The question is answered by another question.

Example: "Do you want it?" Was the response to, "will I get the job I am applying for?" The High Priestess was the selected card. The answerer later said he was interpreting the lack of movement in the image. I guy asked, "How do I loose weight". The card selected was the nine of swords. Player one said, "do you have a fear of success?" The third wanted to know if he felt comfortable in his body. "Do you like yourself", enquired the fourth player.

A Fresh Perspective

Changing the speed always changes the dynamic – such as question must be answered in ten or sixty seconds - as does changing the questioner/answerer:
1)    Change direction. From clockwise to anti clockwise or visa versa.
2)    Have the players read for every second person.
3)    Asking those players sitting opposite each other to ask and answer each others questions.

Left Brain Right Brain Workout

Many a questioner becomes lost for words, “Oh dear… it’s my turn, but I cannot think what to ask”. Deep in the intuitive right brain when answering a question, the player has a mental blank when they switch to the brains rational left to ask one.
This mental blank is a still space where the player can recognize the difference in the brains two hemispheres. Peter called it the “switch”. Greater access to both states, the goal. Once easy passage between the two, is mastered, a deeper, yet more effective, process became possible. The end result of which was more intuitive, creative and pithy responses to game (and life) questions.

Conclusion

The game is an ideal for the independent tarot practitioner, as a weekly touchstone for their clients. It offers additional personal development that is as enjoyable as it is effective. Peter and I priced the game at around half the price of a standard tarot reading, so it super accessible.

This is not to say that friends can’t play, however, the lack of player diversity does diminish the effectiveness of the group as an oracle. Already, tarot groups are playing to perfect there reading skills. Many play with family, finding the game to be a fun form of group therapy. Corporations, clubs and community organizations play to resolve conflict and build crew morale. I'm curious: What will your version of the Tarot Game be?

Sally Bain

For Peter Rosson ART

Bibliography

Surowiecki, J 2004, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter Than the Few, Abacus, London.

NOTE:This was first published on the Association for Tarot Studies website. Sally presented Peter's Game at their 2005 International Tarot Conference in Melbourne.