Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Zephyr Pfotenhauer. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Zephyr thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
I recently completed designing and illustrating an original Tarot deck, drawing on my years of experience as a graphic artist and printmaker to portray the cards in a contemporary CMYK color palette.
I’ve been reading and studying the Tarot since I was a teen and had long fantasized about creating a personal deck, but it wasn’t until my husband Ben died in a tragic accident in 2020 that that desire became a necessity: my design career required me to draw every day, but I could barely bring myself to do so. I started drawing the cards six months after Ben’s death and doing so helped me slowly return to the land of the living and to my own creative practice. I pulled each card randomly, researched extensively and then used Adobe Fresco on my iPad Pro to hand-draw them in three layers — cyan, yellow and magenta — resulting in vector illustrations that can be infinitely scaled and screen-printed.
The process of completing what I now call the Bon Sequitur Tarot deck took just over three years and gave me a lens to experience and understand the themes of my journey in a universal or archetypal light: moving through every stage of grief while single parenting, buying and selling a home, moving to a new state, navigating new relationships, reconfiguring my finances and re-discovering my joy.
I see the Tarot as a story-telling or story-making tool and as such, creating my own deck was instrumental in creating my new life’s story — one that began in tragedy but is now fuller and richer than I could have imagined.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I’ve been drawing since before I could write and since my late-teens have recorded much of my life’s stories in illustrated journals and sketchbook diaries. At 20 I realized art-making was a thread that ran through all of my other interests and decided that going to art school would legitimize my passion. Seven years, three countries and two degrees later I graduated with an MA in Visual and Critical Studies into a financial crisis and quickly realized that so much art school had done little to teach me about the business of art itself… and that I’d better learn to hustle if I wanted to continue working in what gave me joy.
Despite having had little technical training I quickly taught myself Adobe Illustrator (this was before many online tutorials existed) and began building a freelance design business while raising my then-infant son. I had a background working in public health and many of my early clients were community health clinics and non-profit organizations for whom I designed logos, brochures, annual reports and other super boring collateral.
In 2013 I began working in the craft beer industry, which afforded me much more creative license. I designed & illustrated hundreds of can and bottle labels, signs, merchandise and branding packages for independent breweries up and down California’s central coast.
Since moving to Portland in 2021 I’ve mostly been focusing on personal projects: telling stories of loss and recovery through words and image via the Bon Sequitur Tarot deck, my Substack newsletter Black Swan Phenom and the occasional auto-comic.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
I think it’s fair to say that I’ve had an unusual life so far, one that’s been both white-middle-class-
A lot of my former identity and how I valued myself had been built on my determination to become a working-artist & the success I’d attained doing so (or rather, had been in the continual process of attempting and expanding upon). I took incredible pride in making a living from drawing and design. Like most artists, I supplemented with side-hustles until I could afford to follow it full-time, and the work that paid the most was often the least inspired (layout, websites, information design) — but I was paid to draw, and that in itself fulfilled a childhood dream.
After my partner died I went through an intense period of reconfiguring my identity and relearning to identify what holds value to me, both as an artist and as a human with one short life to live. Any work that felt out of alignment or burdensome (which, in the beginning, was all of it) was put on hiatus — some forever. I fired a lot of clients. Then came a period of grandiose ideas, almost all of which were based in an external notion of what I “should” do, what would look good doing. But slowly I’ve been realizing that when I strip myself of the various fantasies of how I wish to be seen from the outside and allow the truth of my drives and curiosities to take up space, I shorten the distance between desire and attainment & experience an expansive spaciousness of just-being. What more can we ask for? I guess I do still seek some kind of notoriety, but if it comes I want it to be for something that’s truly meaningful for me.
And of course, I already know what that is. In my teens and twenties — before the multiple deaths and and subsequent pain-management via bars and boys — before the kid and the career and the husband and the house in the woods — I was writing about my life, drawing tarot and mirroring myself in comics. It’s just that somewhere along the way I internalized the message that it wasn’t legitimate art and/or was of little value… but now I’m in a place where I can take some risks and create my own legitimacy if I believe it to be so, because life is short and the system is fucked and if you can do what gives you joy or peace for godssake you better do it and share it if you can.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
Artists and designers deserve to be paid, full stop. Art is work. Developing creativity — and making a career of it — takes skill, practice, determination, flexibility, failure, & resilience… just because something is “fun” for the maker doesn’t mean its not worthy of payment, and even doing what we love is sometimes a total battle.
Ours is such a visual culture and yet we still hold a collective belief that art or craft is something one does in one’s “free time.” I believe all creatives should demand fair wages for their work and for that of their peers… and believing that one’s art practice has value for society begins with valuing it within oneself. Be the change!
Contact Info:
- Website: bonsequitur.com
- Instagram: @zephyrpfo.o
- Substack: https://zephyrpfo.
substack.com/ - Linkedin: https://www.
linkedin.com/in/zephyrpfo/