Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Encountered this morning on Pinterest, this remarkable artwork: a playing card showing the jack of hearts in the arms of the king of spades and holding hands with him:

(#1) A same-sex encounter in the palace of cards, the work of Iranian-born Mahdieh Farhadkiaei; according to the site of the publisher of this playing-card art, Black Dragon Press (“a family-run print publisher based in London, UK”), she’s “an illustrator and concept artist working in advertising and fashion”

MF’s first set of these cards shows same-sex romantic pairings (both female and male), mixed-sex romantic pairings, and scenes of palace intrigue, all involving the characters on the three face cards (king, queen, and jack), as well as some solo portraits; we can only hope that more depictions of palace life are on the way.

From the first set, one more male-male romantic pairing:

(#2) The jack of diamonds and the jack of clubs / clovers kissing; you can tell which is which from the details in the art (the jack of diamonds has a diamond on his forehead, the jack of clubs is wearing a collar with clubs on it)

Note that in this combination of two cards, the diamond is the inner card, the club the outer card (in #1, the jack is is the inner card, the king the outer card), so that other arrangements of two jacks are possible: the club could have been the inner card and the diamond the outer card; the red jack could have been a heart; the black jack could have been a spade; both the inner and outer cards could have been black, or both red — though since the cards depict characters, the inner and outer cards presumably couldn’t be jacks of the same suit, since those would depict the same character.

Then a male-male pairing whose interpretation is not so clear:

(#3) The jack of spades and the king of hearts, together clasping a torch

And, finally, what looks like an image of court intrigue:

(#4) The king of hearts getting a glass of wine from the king of clubs, who pours out his own glass; apparently it’s the Affair of the Poisoned Goblet

“The pellet with the poison’s in the flagon with the dragon; the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true” (from The Court Jester (1955)) — while in #4, it’s the goblet with the clover that will truly knock you over.

Amazing what you can do within the conventions of the playing card form.

This entry was posted on January 13, 2024 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Art, Homosexuality, Movies and tv, Play, Signs and symbols. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.