The Red Temperance
This essay examines Carly Mazur's striking illustration of Faithless Looting and the backlash that befell it.
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This is Faithless Looting by Carly Janine Mazur. It was painted with oils and acrylics on masonite. It measures 18 inches wide by 24 inches tall. Faithless Looting debuted in Strixhaven for the Mystical Archive series in April 2021 – upon release, the painting was met with extraordinary backlash and blistering criticism, a rainfall of verbal daggers and harassment and outcry. Faithless Looting was a printing error. Faithless Looting was a product of woke politics. Faithless Looting was commissioned to bring the end of Western Civilization.
Faithless Looting was also Carly Mazur’s first painting for Magic, a game she admired as a kid.
Carly Mazur: “When I was 5 years old, my brother would take me to the comic shop, and he would play Magic. I was too young for it at the time…I would look at all the cards, I would look at everything in the cases, all the comics…We grew up on 90’s cartoons, which were super wacky, and I just loved it. I knew that I wanted to draw for the rest of my life.”
Like many of us, her earliest memories of Magic involved staring enraptured at illustrations on old cards. Living Wall by Anson Maddocks is an image that has remained with her since childhood, one that inspired her to pursue visual arts. Indiscernible viscera, a row of disembodied teeth, eyes floating in a gelatinous membrane – echoes of its composition reappeared on a recent commission, a book cover for CJ Leede’s slasher novel titled “Maeve Fly.”
Carly’s style is a marriage of pop-art color palettes and graphical textures layered along flat planes. True-to-life realism is reserved for the human figures, usually women, who interface with two-dimensional vectors and objects, like spiritual successors to Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The digital world is invasive and inescapable in her work. Key to her process is mapping compositions in Photoshop. Preliminary sketches involve resizing and reshaping elements on screens before transferring the outlines to hardboard and painting everything by hand. Sheets of gold and silver leaf complement the pieces with a glimmer unachievable in oils.
Carly Mazur: “When I was in high school, I was definitely admiring more of the modern, late-90’s, early 2000’s Magic artists like Rebecca Guay, Scott Fischer, Donato Giancola, Dan Dos Santos. Dan Dos Santos actually grew up in the same town that I did, so we had the same art teachers, and every single teacher was like ‘Oh, you remind me so much of this student that I had ten years ago named Dan Dos Santos!’”
Scott Fischer, Dan Dos Santos, Rebecca Guay – the lineage is traceable in Mazur’s illustrations. But she never thought she could work for Magic. Her paintings were too out there and different and weird. They didn’t lend to the game’s traditionally high-fantasy trappings.
Carly Mazur: “I would talk to Art Directors and they would say, ‘your stuff is phenomenal, but you need that one project, that one person to give you that chance.’ I’m so grateful for Tom Jenkot to give me that chance to jump into Magic. I was thrilled, I was like ‘yes, absolutely, I do want to do this.’”
When Tom Jenkot contacted Carly Mazur, he didn’t ask that she dilute or refocus her vision. He loved her portfolio and gave her free rein to paint as she wished. The first art description he sent called for “a stylized illustration of a famous spell being cast for the first time…an act of desecration and power.” Central to the piece would be a “female cultist in a hooded robe [standing] in a symmetrical pose. She holds two bowls [pointing in opposite orientations.] The bowl in one hand blazes straight upward with magical fire, the other pours wine downward [onto the floor.] [She is in the] interior of a stylized, wrecked cathedral, [perhaps] with arched, gothic windows or a broken, stained glass mural [in the backdrop.]”
Jenkot invited Mazur to consider tarot cards for this concept. Tarot is entrenched in symbolism; each card relies on esoteric imagery to communicate its message. Carly cites Temperance as an influence for Faithless Looting. In Temperance, we find an androgynous, winged angel standing with one foot in water and one on land, metaphors of the spiritual and earthly realms respectively. They are donned in a white robe, the color of purity. Across their chest is the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter word for God, and beneath the Hebrew inscription are two shapes: the square represents the four elements of alchemy which frames the triangle of the Holy Trinity. Behind the angel grow Irises, a nod to the Greek goddess of the same name. Temperance is among the four cardinal virtues, and every component of the image communicates balance and moderation. The figure in the foreground pours water into wine between two goblets, thinning the liquids to equilibrium.
Faithless Looting departs from the same visual language of the tarot, but inverts its message. This spell rejects self-restraint and embraces chaos: the cups are dissociated, the wine is tossed aside, the white-robed angel is a zealot in red. Unlike in previous printings of the card, the illustration does not provide a realistic, one-to-one representation of the mechanic or the location. This was among the many criticisms that Carly faced with the piece – uninformed players claimed that nowhere did the painting depict “faithless” or “looting.” The Japanese Mystical Archive version by Shiro Yayoi is compositionally identical, but it was not disparaged in the same way. Understanding the symbolism of the tarot cards that inspired the prompt helps us read these images and interpret their signs. Not every painting must be so literal.
Carly also withstood complaints that the piece was “unfinished.”
Carly Mazur: “When you break down a painting, it helps if you squint and blur it a little bit to be able to tell different elements from each other. I knew from the get-go that they were asking for full card art, and I didn’t want to put too much detail in the bottom because nobody was really going to see it anyway, but I did want it to be visually interesting. That’s why most of the detail is towards the top…a lot of people were surprised to see that it was a full painting rather than just that one little cutout.”
Many fans noted that drastically cropping the portrait to fit the card frame did a great disservice to Carly’s work. Others blamed the yellow of the Mystical Archive frame for clashing with the painting’s primary colors. Malagor Auramag on Twitter tested the illustration in a variety of frames from Magic’s past, and all of them make strong candidates for a future reprint. The subdued red of the premodern frame gives priority to the vibrant tones and lets them shine, while the full-art borderless frame embraces the verticality of the composition without compromise. It is undeniable that card frames influence how we experience illustrations on Magic cards, even if they are intended to be partially invisible.
Among the most vitriolic comments were insults from people who claimed this was a five minute project in Microsoft Paint, that a third grader could do it, or that they themselves could do it.
Carly Mazur: “People are so accustomed to digital artwork nowadays that they thought, ‘oh, I just took a photo, and just slapped it on, and called it a day!’ It was a lot more involved than that. People were actually kind of shocked that people paint things traditionally still. But it’s so important for me to do that because there’s a lot of texture and information that you get from paint. It just doesn’t exist in digital artwork.”
Personal attacks and mockery fell in abundance following the preview announcement. It was clear that Carly’s work struck a particular nerve in certain subsections of Magic, that many were threatened by this departure in style. Dismissing a painting based on its technical choices or perceived skillset is deader than all the dead horses. “I could do that” is reactionary muck, an elementary view of the world. “I could do that” is the rallying cry of the dense and the insecure. Those who open themselves to challenging paintings and music and dance and poetry do not measure the value of art against their ability to reproduce it. Art is not a pissing match. Art is an exercise in empathy. Art is a vessel – it fosters relationships between people, between objects and sentiments and ideas. Art is an open invitation to expand your perspective and grow.
Carly Mazur: “First and foremost, it was so different than what we’d been seeing on Magic art…People fear change, and I understand that people who play Magic: the Gathering aren’t going to have the same eye as people who go to see a MoMa exhibit in New York City…I understand people have different tastes, and it was the first time seeing that kind of artwork in that context.”
Despite the outrage, Carly told me she took the feedback to heart and did well to separate signal from white noise.
Carly Mazur: “I took it as legitimate critique, and now, however many years later…since I’ve done the painting, I would change things. I would’ve improved on some things…you have to take critique piecemeal, because if you take everyone’s advice, you’re going to lose yourself in it. But if you can look at it, even if it’s harsh and mean criticism, but if you can get something out of that, that’s important.”
Four years removed from the finished piece, there are some details that Carly would approach differently.
Carly Mazur: “I would probably give the figure makeup. Like some really dramatic makeup…lipstick or face paint or tattoos or something. I’m a One Piece fan, and there’s so much characterization in that show.”
Since 2020, Carly has only painted a handful of cards for Magic, yet she remains active in galleries and busy with private commissions. Although Faithless Looting was singled-out as unorthodox, none of the 63 cards from the Mystical Archive series align with the accepted aesthetic identity of Magic. None of them are medieval high-fantasy, none of them would be classified as “Imaginative Realism.” In the past five years, art directors have widened their scope to welcome illustrators and graphic designers who break the mold of tradition and bring new life to the game. The rules have been rewritten, the old guard has left their post. In many ways, this era resembles the first five years of Magic, when a rowdy crew of misfits had a wild idea for a trading card game and an avant-garde approach to its imagery. The sky was the limit then, and commissions like Faithless Looting prove it is the limit once more.
Sam: “…a very simple question, do you like this piece? Do you like it? I think it’s normal to not like your own work to a certain extent, but now that you’re a few years removed. Plain and simple, do you like the painting?”
Carly Mazur: “Yeah, I like the painting. It’s alright!”
Sam: “Great. Great to hear it…”
Carly Mazur will have Artist Proofs displayed at Nucleus Gallery in Alhambra, California for the second Magic: the Gathering in Miniature show hosted by Donny Caltrider. The exhibition opens April 13th, and it looks like Faithless Looting will indeed make an appearance.
Carly Mazur: “As an artist, you have to offer something to the world that only you can. And if you have this artwork that falls into the same mold as everything else, you’re not going to stand out…I’ve always been a difficult child, and wanted to do my own thing, which was present in college when I would get these assignments and I would get a B– because I wouldn’t follow the prompts to a tee...”
“If you’re aspiring to be an artist of any kind, be true to yourself. If you have inspirations, don’t try to be like them…take what you like from anything that you like, put it together, see what happens.”
You can purchase prints of Faithless Looting at originalmagicart.store. You can purchase Carly’s original paintings on her website and through the various galleries where she shows her work. You can support this show by joining the Patreon and by making radical art. Thank you for reading.
Sources
https://x.com/CarlyLady/status/1376277773036220420?s=20 - Carly Mazur – Faithless Looting and Harmonize
https://x.com/ManaCurves/status/1375885068636413953?s=20 - ManaCurves - Abstract Collages
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/mdrgop/sta_faithless_looting/ - Faithless Looting Reddit Preview
https://imgur.com/a/fEPc2hI/ - Full-size renders of Faithless Looting and Harmonize https://dotesports.com/mtg/news/faithless-looting-artist-carly-mazur-on-mtg- community-reaction-artistic-style - Community Reactions to Faithless Looting https://www.pressreader.com/australia/imagine-fx/20220927/282419878112444 - Carly Mazur Interview with ImagineFX
https://magic.facetofacegames.com/in-defense-of-that-faithless-looting-art/ - In Defense of That Faithless Looting Art
https://www.reddit.com/r/mtg/comments/15ibfjz/ thats_the_ugliest_card_ive_ever_seen_my_girlfriend/ - That’s the Ugliest Card I’ve Ever Seen
http://www.impressionism.org/teachimpress/browse/aboutimpress.htm - Impressionism Overview
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-many-deaths-of-a-painting/ - The Many Deaths of a Painting
https://karinastarot.com/temperance-symbols/ - Tarot Symbology: Temperance http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/critics/louis-leroy.htm - Louis Leroy Biography https://redriotgames.ca/products/ultra-pro-wall-scroll-japanese-mystical-archive- faithless-looting?variant=43153190387944 - Faithless Looting Wall Scroll by Shiro Yayoi
https://x.com/MalagorAuramag/status/1376480974935097345?s=20 - Faithless Looting - Alternate Frames https://x.com/MalagorAuramag/status/1376293294066515968?s=20 - Faithless Looting - Extended Frames
https://twitter.com/CarlyLady/status/1376277773036220420/photo/1 - Faithless Looting / Harmonize Originals - Carly Mazur