I • LE•BATELEUR

 

I • LE•BATELEUR
Pen, ink & gouache on watercolor paper
15 x 30 cm
30 July 2014


90% tinker, 10% reaver and far from being simple, Le Bateleur has translated into English as The Magician. The original word Bateleur is medieval French, signifying a person who shows off his manual and verbal dexterity in market-places, a specialist in subtle and supple movements. Kind of like a modern day street-performer. Maybe this is how Bateleur became Magician, performing optical illusions and manual wizardry.

I picked the card (at random, as usual) after coming down off the Wheel,and back from the Star, around the 23rd July, but started and finished the card on the 29th-30th. Why the wait? After all, being one of my favourite cards, I had been impatient to pick it out. Imaginary hurdles and real-world obstacles delayed starting. Moreover, I was getting side-tracked, taking on other unnecessary work, deciding to record a song, thinking about other art projects. 

Le Bateleur is a call-to-action, but also obliges decision-making and commitment to the choice taken. When I got round to starting it, I realised that the card and the project as a whole would only happen with that commitment. While everything is possible, it is not possible to do and be everything at once. With that realisation, and having post-poned or cancelled the noise, all the tools became at my disposition, like the tools spread out before the character.

The Tarot being a mirror of sorts, I realised I was projecting the role of the artist on to Le Bateleur - he is also a crafts-man, an engineer, a stage compère, a distributor of tracts. He gambles with chance, or possibly fabricates chance itself. After the Roulette of the Wheel of Fortune, here we have the manipulator of dice. Now a third-way through this adventure, is it an accident that the numbers on each of the three faces of the dice add up to 7, when this is the seventh card I have selected ? And three times seven being 21 ...

WHO’S NEXT ?

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