The Hanged Man: Just a Stop Along the Way

Sometimes a painting takes an unexpected turn. Sometimes you look at what you've been creating and realize that the vision you started with isn't quite the vision you want to bring into the world anymore.

That's what happened with The Hanged Man.

I originally planned a much simpler background, with a buttery yellow sky and purple mountains. But as I continued working, I decided that wasn't the world I wanted this figure to inhabit. So I repainted nearly the entire landscape.

Now, purple and red clouds swirl across the sky above greenish mountains. A trail winds through the grass in the foreground, framed by the two columns from which the bat hangs. The trail disappears into the mountains and clouds, leading somewhere the viewer cannot see.

I wanted the landscape to feel otherworldly. Not quite a place you could find on a map, but somewhere that might exist between dreams, visions, and the edges of reality.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that perhaps this isn't a place where The Hanged Man belongs. Maybe it's simply a stop along his journey.

A Pause Is Not an Ending

The Hanged Man has always carried a fascinating contradiction. He is suspended, seemingly unable to move forward, yet his stillness offers a different perspective. What looks like stagnation from one angle might be transformation from another.

I don't imagine my Hanged Man as someone who has reached the end of his journey. I imagine him passing through.

Perhaps this strange landscape is a place he needs to visit. Perhaps there is something here he must see, experience, or understand before continuing onward. The trail is still there, stretching into the unknown. Its destination remains hidden by the mountains and clouds.

He doesn't need to know what's waiting beyond them just yet.

Neither does the viewer.

I like that uncertainty. The painting doesn't need to explain everything or offer a clear answer. It only needs to capture this particular moment: a figure suspended between where he has been and where he might go next.

Sometimes, the pause itself is part of the journey.

Following the Trail Into the Unknown

The new landscape has become more than a backdrop. The strange colors, the columns, the grass, and the disappearing trail all contribute to the feeling that this place exists outside the ordinary world.

The path gives the eye somewhere to travel, but it offers no promise of an easy destination. It simply continues until the landscape swallows it.

I think there's something fitting about that uncertainty, especially for a tarot card. We often want the cards to tell us what comes next, to make the unknown a little less frightening. But sometimes the most honest answer is that we can only see the next stretch of the path.

We cannot see the entire journey from where we stand.

And perhaps we don't need to.

As an artist, I sometimes begin a painting with a particular idea, only to discover that the work wants to become something else. Changing direction doesn't mean the original vision was a mistake. It means I've continued looking, questioning, and discovering along the way.

The Hanged Man's new landscape feels like an extension of that process. I let go of the simpler background I had planned and made room for something stranger, more mysterious, and closer to what I wanted to express.

The painting changed because my vision changed.

One Moment in a Much Larger Story

Original column

New column.

As I continue building my Phantasmagoria Tarot, I find myself thinking about how each card might exist within a larger, interconnected universe. Each figure occupies a particular place, experiencing a particular moment, but none of them necessarily represents the whole story.

The Hanged Man may be suspended here for now. The trail continues without him needing to follow it immediately. The mountains and clouds conceal what comes next, and the landscape remains open to possibility.

He is not necessarily lost. He is not necessarily trapped. He is simply here, for this moment in time.

And eventually, the journey will continue.

I find comfort in that idea. We don't always know why we've arrived at a particular point in our lives. We don't always understand what we're supposed to learn from it, or how the place we're standing in connects to the destination we once imagined.

Sometimes we have to stop. Sometimes our perspective changes. Sometimes the road ahead disappears into the clouds.

That doesn't mean the journey is over.

A View of Ononodoga Lake on my walk after I was done painting for the day.

For now, The Hanged Man remains suspended in his strange, otherworldly landscape, framed by the columns and surrounded by a world that refuses to explain itself. His trail leads onward, even if none of us can see where it goes.

Perhaps that's enough.

For this moment, he is exactly where he needs to be.

And the journey is still his to continue.

A Buttery Yellow, a Hanged Man, and the Storm Ahead

Yesterday, I was determined to make at least a little progress on The Hanged Man. I had been putting it off, partly because moving a wet oil painting is a pain in the ass, and partly because I have no idea where I will be moving or what my circumstances will look like once I get there. Starting something new felt a little like creating another problem for my future self.

But eventually, I pushed through. I mixed the yellow for the background and got to work.

I didn't match the original color perfectly, but it was close enough to cover the old paint showing through. Yellow can be frustratingly translucent, so getting the coverage right takes patience. I wanted to do more, but the sunlight pouring through the windows had other plans. We never put up window treatments in the art room, so the afternoon sun can be brutal. I usually wear sunglasses and a hat if I need to work in there during those hours, but trying to color-match paint while wearing sunglasses is less than ideal.

Then there were the bugs. Ladybugs, a beetle, a stink bug, and a few flies had all decided the art room was the place to be. Between those unwanted visitors, the water-damaged ceiling, and the very real possibility of mold, it wasn't exactly an inspiring environment. I'd already started moving my art supplies out of that room because of the damage, only to have them moved right back in after I'd made space to work at the dining room table.

So, for now, The Hanged Man has a buttery pale yellow background. That's it. Not exactly a monumental accomplishment, but it's something. I'll try mixing some browns for the bat and greens for the moss next. We'll see how far I get today.

Sometimes, making art isn't about waiting for the perfect conditions. Sometimes, it's about finding a small window of opportunity in the middle of everything else falling apart.

Speaking of everything else, I'm still working on finding employment. I've applied to 111 jobs since the beginning of the year, including 21 since leaving my most recent job. I'd like to submit at least three more applications today. It's exhausting putting yourself out there over and over, trying to find something that fits your skills, your needs, and your circumstances. But I keep trying.

I also wish my Patreon brought in a little more income. I'm genuinely grateful for the patrons who support my work, and I don't want that gratitude to get lost in the frustration. But $15 a month doesn't leave much room to build the kind of financial foundation I'd need to pursue some of my bigger project ideas. Especially when I'm preparing for a move and buying groceries on a credit card.

I've been trying to explore other ways to bring my art into the world, too. I recently got a working Cricut, with some help from my partner toward the cost. Even at Goodwill, prices can sometimes be surprisingly steep. Of course, getting the machine was only the beginning. Now I need the right paper, vinyl, designs, and templates, along with plenty of trial and error.

I did manage to find a few rolls of vinyl at Ollie's, although the colors and sizes were limited. My goal is to start making sketchbooks featuring my own artwork as decals or stickers. It's another small idea that could eventually grow into something meaningful, both creatively and financially. For now, I'm figuring it out one experiment at a time.

There is so much I want to make. So many ideas waiting for their turn. Sometimes I wish I could skip the part where I have to figure out how to fund everything, find the space to work, and keep myself afloat long enough to bring those ideas to life.

I'm trying not to share too much about my personal life here, but I suspect some significant changes are coming. I may soon be navigating things on my own, and there is a lot of uncertainty in that. I'm doing my best to take things one day at a time, even when the future feels like a painting I've only just begun, with no idea where I'll be when the final layers dry.

For now, there is a little yellow on The Hanged Man. There are job applications to send, sketchbooks to experiment with, and a whole lot of figuring things out to do.

And then there is Zoey.

kitty 🍞 

He's happy and healthy, and that matters more than I can say. Whatever happens next, we'll face it together.

We will survive the storm together.

And maybe, just maybe, something beautiful will come out of all this uncertainty.

The Hanged Man and the Art of Being Stuck

There is something strangely appropriate about working on The Hanged Man in October.

Old version

October has always seemed like a month when the dead are a little closer to the surface. The leaves change, the days grow shorter, Halloween approaches, and suddenly the things we spend the rest of the year trying not to think about—death, ghosts, bones, decay, endings—are everywhere.

Maybe that's why I've been thinking about this card again.

Or maybe it's because I've been feeling a little stuck.

The Hanged Man is one of those cards that I have struggled with in a very personal way. In the traditional imagery, he hangs suspended upside down, seemingly trapped. But the longer I spend with the card, the less I see imprisonment and the more I see suspension.

He isn't necessarily going nowhere.

He's simply not moving in the direction he expected.

And sometimes that is exactly what being an artist feels like.

The original painting wasn't taking me where I wanted it to go, so rather than abandoning the canvas, I painted over it.

There is something almost unsettling about painting over a painting.

The previous image doesn't completely disappear. Sometimes traces remain underneath—the ghost of an arm, a change in texture, a shape that no longer makes sense but still exists beneath the surface.

In a way, it becomes another kind of palimpsest(reused parchment).

A record of the version of the painting that didn't survive.

And perhaps that is appropriate for The Hanged Man.

Because sometimes being stuck isn't about having nothing to show for your time.

Sometimes it means you are becoming something different underneath the surface....

The past few months haven't exactly made it easy to stay focused on a 78-card tarot deck.

Life has a way of interrupting art.

Recently, I've lost two family members and a friend.

My aunt on my mother's side passed away about a week before what would have been my mom's birthday. I always called my aunt my second mom, so losing her has carried a particular kind of weight.

There is something strange about losing someone so close to another loss. Dates begin to overlap. Memories become tangled together. One absence reminds you of another.

And then there was my uncle.

I hadn't seen him in several years. He had been living in a nursing home, and I kept thinking about making the extra trip to see him.

I never did.

That is one of the difficult things about grief: sometimes the pain isn't only about losing someone.

Sometimes it is about all the things you thought you still had time to do.

The visit you could make later.

The phone call you could make tomorrow.

The assumption that there would be another opportunity.

There isn't always one....

And then there was a friend I gained after moving out here.

He gave us an Edgar Allan Poe stuffed animal with a little raven perched on his shoulder. He also gave me a tiny backpack with a dangling skeleton.

They are small, almost silly objects.

But grief has a strange way of changing the weight of ordinary things.

Suddenly a stuffed Poe isn't just a stuffed Poe.

A tiny skeleton dangling from a backpack isn't just a decoration.

Objects become evidence.

Proof that someone was here.

Proof that there was a relationship, a moment, a kindness.

Something remains...

This is perhaps where The Hanged Man becomes more interesting to me. We often think of being stuck as wasted time.

I certainly do.

There is a voice in my head that looks at unfinished paintings and unfinished projects and immediately translates them into failure.

You should be further along.

You should have finished this already.

You should be working on the next card.

You shouldn't still be struggling with this one.

But The Hanged Man doesn't seem particularly interested in productivity.

He hangs there.

He waits.

He looks at the world from a completely different angle.

And maybe the point isn't to force yourself out of suspension.

Maybe the point is to ask what you can see from here that you couldn't see while standing upright.

---

There is something particularly strange about being an artist while grieving.

The world doesn't stop.

There are still paintings waiting for paint.

There are emails to answer.

Bills to pay.

Laundry.

Work.

The ordinary machinery of life continues moving even when some part of you feels suspended outside of it.

And art doesn't always provide the escape people imagine it does.

Sometimes it makes you look more closely.

At death.

At the body.

At memory.

At the things we lose.

At the things we leave unfinished.

At all the versions of ourselves that exist underneath the current one.

Phantasmagoria was always going to be about these things.

I just didn't always know how personally I would encounter them while making it.

---

new

The Hanged Man is still unfinished.

The Major Arcana is still unfinished.

Phantasmagoria is still unfinished.

And, honestly, so am I.

Maybe that's why I keep coming back to this card.

The Hanged Man isn't dead.

He isn't defeated.

He hasn't disappeared.

He's simply suspended between what was and what comes next.

And perhaps that is not the same thing as being stuck.

Perhaps sometimes we are simply in the middle of becoming something we cannot see yet.

So I am trying to give myself permission to stay there for a little while.

To repaint the canvas.

To let the old image disappear beneath the new one.

To remember the people who are no longer here.

To feel the things I haven't finished feeling.

And then, eventually, to turn the painting right side up and see what has changed.

For this version of The Hanged Man, I chose a bat. There is something fitting about a creature that spends so much of its existence suspended upside down in darkness. We tend to think of being stuck as something negative—a failure to move forward—but the bat doesn't seem to see it that way. It hangs, waits, listens, and navigates a world that looks completely different from our own. Maybe suspension isn't always about being trapped. Maybe sometimes it is about learning how to see differently before you move again.

October feels like a fitting time for that.

The dead are close.

The leaves are letting go.

And somewhere in the studio, The Hanged Man is still waiting for me...