Tools / Kat's Kards
Kat's Kards
I came acrossJerry Gretzinger's mapa while back and fell into a bit of a rabbit hole. He's been working on the same painting since 1963 - an enormous, hand-painted map of a world that doesn't exist, added to almost every day for over sixty years. What got me wasn't just the scale of it. It was the cards.
Every session, Jerry draws from a deck of handmade cards that tell him what to do: expand this region, let the water take over, erase a section and start fresh. He doesn't choose. The deck chooses. He just makes the piece. It removes that moment of standing in front of your work and going blank, or worse, going safe.
This is my version of that for my own practice. You build a deck out of whatever categories matter to you - color, subject, medium, scale, mood, whatever - and give your series a name. Pull a card. Every card in a named series always comes up the same, so you can come back to piece 12 next month and know exactly what you were working with.
A few things that helped me when I started using it:
- Start with two or three categories. Weather and subject. Color and scale. You can always add more later, but less is easier to commit to.
- The series name is everything. "sketchbook-2025" and "big-paintings" will deal completely different hands on the same card number. Name it something you'll remember.
- Don't skip cards you don't like. The whole point is that you agreed to it before you looked. Make the piece anyway - some of my best work came from constraints I would have never chosen myself.
- Load one of the presets to get started, then add, remove, or rewrite categories until it feels like yours.
Decks
Name your series anything you'll remember. The same name always deals the same deck.
What number is this piece in your series? Type 1 for your first, 2 for your second, and so on. Come back to any number later and you'll get the same hand.