It's late, so I'll keep this brief. The concept for this drawing came to me all at once in a sort of perceptual burst, and I literally stopped whatever else I was doing so I could sit down and start picking away at it. Appropriate, since the Ace of Swords is the go-to card for intellectual hairpin turns that point in unforeseen directions, toward new possibilities.
The symbolism here is pretty straightforward. The suit of Swords is associated with the element of air, hence the feather. It's also associated with awareness and intellect, which makes the peacock's cycloptic plume especially apt.
But what I wanted to do beyond there is show the feather being split in two. I don't know about you, but I can't resist picking things apart -- straws, popsicle sticks, relationships, anything really. So whenever I get my hands on a peacock feather, its hours are numbered. They pull apart so perfectly! The individual barbs peel off into tiny sub-feathers, the shaft splits and unzips into long ribbons. Not even the perfect, iridescent eye, which only an unfeeling psychopath would ever want to put out, escapes mutilation.
The suit of Swords teaches us about the powers of discernment and discrimination, and the Ace is where it all begins: a unified vision, magical in its fleeting wholeness and ripe for shredding into individual thoughts and observations. Eventually even the shreds will be picked to shreds and the suit will have run its course -- at which point there is really nothing to do but throw the whole mess away and look for a new feather.
Hopefully you'll forgive me for starting in on this particular feather, threatening to divide the Ace before you've even had a chance to enjoy its perfection. I shouldn't rush ahead, I know. Considering how hard it was to resist pulling that eye apart into a set of binoculars, you should be quite proud.
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