Rainbow Squared

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Windows and Doors

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A developing DIY divination system based on 49 pairs of colors from a 7x7 rainbow grid. Colormancy, creative practice, spiritual reckoning.
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Windows and Doors

Return again, return again

Jan 3, 2023
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Moon Sun Rainbow Wheel: a circle whose left half is black and white half is right, like the first quarter moon. Around this circle is another ring made of twelve panels going from red to orange to yellow to green to blue to purple and back to red. These panels each change color in a clockwise circle in an infinite loop. The background is gray. The lines are handdrawn and the colors are all filled in digitally so the colors are flat. The negative space between the black and white circle and in between the colored panels makes the shape of a shining sun.

It feels so good when an art piece spontaneously emerges. Like staring at a paned window until its design lodges in your head and you think about it and think about it and then draw it and double it and flip it and animate it until it becomes this symbol or sigil or logo for what, I don’t know. Maybe for my art practice? 

Whatever I do or don’t with this little image (file-named as Moon Sun Rainbow Wheel), creating it was a wake-up call. While I was working on it I felt caffeinated, plugged in, alive, in flow. This was in stark contrast to the rest of 2022, when I didn’t feel that way very often. 

Last January, after five diligent cycles, I paused my practice of completing a series of 49 pieces each year, roughly one piece a week. I was burned out, and also worried that I wasn’t seeing the forest for the trees. That the effort required to complete each individual piece distracted me from understanding the full arc of the project. That the weekly effort distracted me from pretty much anything else. 

Stepping away from the weekly cycle was initially liberating. I was brimming with ideas for the future of Rainbow Squared and finally had a little more space to start turning them into plans. But then came the dread.

A screenshot from Yellow Submarine, the 1968 animated film featuring cartoon characters of the Beatles. A long hallway filled with doors and doors that a small character, the submarine’s captain “Young Fred,” is staring down.
From the 1968 classic Yellow Submarine

I felt like I opened a door into a grand hallway full of other doors. I had intentionally kept the project flexible (vague?) all along, steering in multiple directions at once. Is this visual art? Writing? Performance? Is it one person’s project? Collaborative? Curated? Open source? Does it need to have a gallery show? Does it need to have a social media presence? Is it a creative exercise regime? Is it a divination deck? What is its relationship to Tarot? To the Omer? To being Jewish? Is it Witchcraft? Is it stupid? Is it sacred?

Walking through the right door would realize the full potential for the project. Walking through the wrong door would risk my time, my energy, my resources, and my dignity. Choosing any particular door at all would mean not choosing others. So I hung out in the hallway, staring through a skylight at the changing moon. I wrote just enough to be able to stay in the building, but I didn’t move much.  

So now I am leaving the hallway. I am picking a damn door and walking through it. It might even be the door I just came from; they all look kind of the same from the outside. Which is just as well since I suspect a lot of these doors lead to the same place.

A looping animated gif of about two and half seconds of the 1968 animated Beatles movie Yellow Submarine where a bunch of wild cartoon characters run back and forth through a hallway of many white doors. Characters include a shooting star, a wheel of feet, a duck, a ship, a monster holding a heart, a superhero, a man holding barbells, and a rainbow snail. Gif made painstakingly by me, ilyse iris.

For 2023, I’m going back to making weekly(ish) Rainbow Squared pieces, working on another series of 49. Back to going in order, from Red Red to Red Orange to Red Yellow all the way to Black White Purple to Black White Black White. My sixth cycle, my seventh year.

I will focus more specifically on creating (another) deck of cards, working as intimately as ever with the tarot. My goal, however, is not to create any one definitive deck. My goal is to emerge from this year with a guide for others to follow the Rainbow Squared journey themselves, creating their own definitive deck.

After a year of ambivalence, I understand that this project has been and always will be about the journey. That the path I take doesn’t matter as much as continuing to move, continuing to make. Despite the very real strain of committing to practice art on top of everything else, it’s the only way I feel like myself. I don’t know when this particular project will be finished, but I know that I need to show up consistently. I want to show up. And after a year without it, I know that weekly accountability is the way I can make that happen.

A looping gif of six images, each 7x7 grids of Years 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 of Rainbow Squared.

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