I was looking forward to a little more action today, hoping to draw something exciting. Instead I drew my second Ace in a row. I nearly cheated and went with the card beneath it instead, but I decided to sit and think about it for a while first -- and I'm glad I did, because that's when I remembered the pineapple lamp.
I got the pineapple lamp at a flea market in Connecticut. Since I had only a certain amount of cash to spend, I was walking around the market in a sort of panic, afraid that anything I paid for would wind up being trumped by some other treasure a few tables over. Meanwhile, anything I passed on could get snapped up by someone else any moment! It was like being in a dream where everything you want is laid out in front of you, but you can only choose one thing.
When I saw the pineapple lamp, I felt a sort of click in my brain. I knew I wouldn't find anything I wanted more than this. I think my friends thought it was a sort of odd purchase, just sort of a 1950s old-lady's-nightstand kind of lamp. "Wait until you see it in the dark," I told them. And... well, I don't think that changed any minds exactly, but I was convinced and that's all that matters.
The lamp is a kind of creamy white ceramic studded with cracked-glass nodules, and the grooves in its surface are filled in with gold enamel. I think it's supposed to look like the base of a pineapple, but it looks more like those eggs in the Alien movies:
The surface is divided into a geometric pattern that combines with the glowing nodules and creamy, golden background to create a beautifully organic ambient warmth:
Anyhow, this isn't the first time I've associated it with the Ace of Cups. It has the same sort of splendid energy I've seen in other portrayals of this card. For example:
So I decided to see if I could sit down and actually draw the pineapple lamp in a way that would do it any justice. I'm pretty happy with what I ended up with, and surprised that it's at all accurate -- that pattern is pretty intense. I left the lamp in the picture unplugged so you could see that its radiance was not dependent on electricity. The pineapple runs on emotional energy! And the moth is sort of a pun based on the dove you see in the RWS version of the card, in this case seduced into the lamp's bioluminous maw. The moth is also a sort of avatar for myself in this case; I imagine that he and I were both to gaze into the pineapple, we'd each see the same thing.
UPDATE: Just saw this today:
The city of Guzhen, China, will soon be home to a "colossal 833-foot luminaire," Metropolis reports. According to the building's own promotional literature, it will be the "world’s only architecture shaped like a huge Western classical oil lamp."
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