When Jeffrey Daymont was born in Hinsdale, a suburb outside Chicago, he gained his first moment of fame for being the first baby born there for the new year.
“I even got my picture in the local paper,” said Daymont, who has been living in Colton the past 12 years.
Daymont studied drafting and architecture in high school.
“My dad was an engineer so I guess I inherited his knack for understanding geometry,” he said. “My school didn’t have computers so everything I learned was old school with t-squares, french curves and triangles. Even though I design all my art in Photoshop now, I still depend on skills I developed with pencil and paper.”
During high school, Daymont also learned to juggle. He created an act that he performed for audiences around the world.
“While the physical act of juggling is primarily a skill, the writing and choreography that goes into putting a show together is definitely an art,” he said. “But the art of juggling is very temporary. It goes by so fast that most people don’t see the patterns and symmetry of it all.”
Daymont lamented that photos and paintings of jugglers are always missing something. So several years ago he started making artwork to represent the movement of juggling.
“I drew from my experience in technical drawing to simulate the physics of gravity and rotation of flying objects,” he said.
Daymont’s most recent project has been the design of playing card decks. The idea began with him wondering how card games might be played differently if the decks were changed.
“I have three card decks so far, and each of them let you play games that you can’t play with a standard deck,” he said.
Before Jeffrey Daymont became a visual artist, he was a professional juggler who performed across he world. (Courtesy of Jeffrey Daymont)
Jeffrey Daymont’s new Celtic knot design is seen in his latest playing card deck. (Courtesy of Jeffrey Daymont)
A design is seen from Jeffrey Daymont’s Janken deck of cards. (Courtesy of Jeffrey Daymont)
His first deck was inspired by an advanced version of the game “rock, paper scissors.” He described it as using the standard ace through king, but with five suits.
“The five suits, rock, paper, scissors, water and lizard, have new relationships,” he said. “Every suit is stronger than two suits, but weaker than two others. I named it the Janken Deck, because in Japan they call the game rock, paper, scissors ‘Jan-Ken.’”
Daymont said that designing the cards has been his biggest art project. For the face cards he used real kings and queens from around the world, including weapons and patterns to represent the cultures where they were from.
“Even though each canvas has just a few inches of space, there is still a lot of information you can fit in there,” he said. “It took about five months to complete the project. Then I ran a Kickstarter campaign to raise funding for the printing costs.”
Daymont’s second project, which he descried as a 4x4x4 deck, was inspired by math.
“Instead of suits and ranks, each card has one of four numbers, colors and items,” he said. “I chose a medieval theme, so the items are keys, axes, shields and coins, and the colors represent the sun, mountain, forest and ocean kingdoms. This 64-card deck is called King’s Keys.”
His newest project, Dark Hand, which includes a Celtic knot pattern he designed this year, was just funded on Kickstarter.
“It’s two 52 card decks, one light and one dark, but spliced together in a different order,” he said. “So if you don’t like the hand you were dealt, you can flip the cards over and play the dark hand instead.”
In the future, Daymont said he would like to try wood block or linoleum cut printing, the way playing cards were printed hundreds of years ago.
“I already have larger prints of my cards, but it would be neat to learn to print them by hand,” he said.
Information: www.jankendeck.com.
Patrick Brien is executive director of the Riverside Arts Council.