Door Number 4: Four of Wands, aka “Karuna”

Happy Easter! I haven’t actually finished Door Number 4, but the front is done, so I thought I’d post before the holiday. This one features a version of the Rider-Waite Tarot card for the Four of Wands.

Four of Wands, aka “Karuna” door front by Laura Bruno

The Sanskrit spells out “Karuna,” which means “compassion” or “the end of all suffering.” My inspiration to include Karuna with this door was two-fold:

I went to a Good Friday service at the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel and felt drawn to go to the left side of the lying down Christ figurine. I’d been thinking of the Holy Grail all week, while wearing a moldavite pendant and saw at the service that the Christ was holding a chalice, which I had already planned for the lower panel. The word “Karuna” just popped into my head as a Sanskrit visual for the center of the door. On a personal note, my sister’s family recently got a puppy that they named Karuna. They call her “Rune” for short, though! This door is in part a welcome door for little Rune. 🙂

My Sister’s Dog, Karuna, aka “Rune”

The bottom quote is by Kahlil Gibran: “Trust in dreams for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.” I kept dreaming of “the 30th card in the Tarot” until I finally remembered from Tom’s reading in Schizandra and the Gates of Mu that the 30th card is the Four of Wands. The image worked for me with a few tweaks, as I had also been dreaming of some specific combinations of Runes that came together in the shape of the couple with their arms at those angles. LOL, very active dream life lately!

A note on colors: the Sanskrit and 9999 on top are written in gold. The fish (walleye) eyes are silver, as are the orbs on top of the wands, and the area surrounding the chalice. The flash makes the silver look white. Again, I must apologize for the BlackBerry photo quality. If you have a professional camera setup and live in Chicago, please contact me! 😉

Top Panel of Four of Wands Door by Laura Bruno

Bottom Panel Four of Wands Door by Laura Bruno

And … as a special treat … I have a before picture! This is what I started with. Well, it’s actually a heavily cleaned version of what I started with. Below is the back before priming it, and believe it or not, the front actually looked worse!

Before Photo Four of Wands Door

Perhaps you can see why I consider painting these doors, or portals, as part of an alchemy process. I might not be turning baser metals into gold, but some of these doors arrive in pretty grim shape! I like to think we can transmute ourselves and our reality into whatever beautiful things we can imagine.

Blessed Be.