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Buddhistic Fantasy Tarot      1982 Shigeki Gomi      Japan                                                   Art Medium: Paintings in gouache with perhaps some airbrushing. Description: Gomi's second deck 'The Buddhistic Fantasy Tarot' is a set of 22 large thick cards in a limited edition of 300 copies. These were unwieldy to shuffle for divination purposes and thus, we can assume, he primarily wished them to be viewed as artworks. This is an early example of a themed tarot deck, where the artist applies the existing tarot imagery to another iconographic system. Here he uses Buddhist statuary and other imagery as the basis for his imagery. He seems to draw on the major school of Japanese Buddhism, called Shingon, which is esoteric and iconographic. This has a complex set of thirteen Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. They are represented in his card designs from the Fool as Shakyamuni or Gautama Buddha, through the Chariot as the Manjusri Bodhisattva (Monju) to the Maitreya Bodhisattva (Miroku) as the Judgement. He created this cards using drawings, which have been coloured, again using an airbrush, the artistic effect of which Gomi obviously admired.