The Fool 22" x 28" acrylics on canvas

I've wanted to paint the Fool since art school. He represents how I feel living my life. I'm a wild card, either of no value or maybe I trump everybody, about to fall to my doom or about to make that quintessentially human leap of imagination where everything changes. When I'm centered, each move comes with an awareness of possibilities spreading out in all directions, of possibilities cut off. It's like walking a tightrope, dancing on a cliff's edge. Every moment, every thought and action has elements of creation and destruction. So I've painted him dancing on that cliff's edge against a bright yellow sky, like in the Rider-Waite deck. He's Shiva, but with two arms, not four. Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, dancing the universe into existence, and dancing it out again. The fire of creative and destructive energy flames on his right, where his third hand would be holding it, and in the air on his left is the drum that his fourth hand would be holding, which provides the beat for his dance. He's wearing the yellow-orange, red and green striped drawstring pants that I bought a few years ago, suggestive of the harlequin costume. His white tee-shirt has a brush-painted zero which in Japanese Buddhism denotes sunyata - emptiness. Above him flies a sacred crane, auspicious in many mythologies, which alone is able to fly to the highest heaven.