Patrick Valenza

Patrick Valenza first encountered tarot at age nine and became fascinated with the artwork on older nineteenth century and medieval influenced decks, studying their imagery closely as a child. As a teenager, between ages fifteen and eighteen, he hand painted the original thirteen cards of what became the Deviant Moon Tarot in a gothic, illuminated style drawing directly on that medieval influence, gradually developing the deck's distinctive characters over several years of solitary work before it reached publication.

Based in Bellport on Long Island, New York, Valenza built the deck's imagery in part from photographs he took of local textures and locations, including the graveyards of eastern Long Island and a nearby abandoned asylum building, scanning his drawings and layering photographic textures over them digitally to produce the finished cards.

The Deviant Moon Tarot has become one of the more recognizable non traditional tarot decks in print, known for its exaggerated, moonlit and often unsettling character designs that depart sharply from the historical Rider Waite Smith tradition most modern decks still follow. Valenza founded Deviant Moon Inc. in 2015 to continue publishing and licensing his tarot work. His path, a private teenage art project developed over years before any commercial publication, is unusual within a tarot market more often built around commissioned illustration or established New Age publishing houses, and situates him closer to an outsider or self taught visual artist than to a professional diviner or spiritual teacher.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Where the Deviant Moon Tarot's origin lies in Patrick Valenza's teenage solitary drawing, its ongoing life as a commercial product runs through a company he founded decades later. In 2015 he established Deviant Moon Inc, registered under the alternate name Fenwood Asylum, a company name that echoes the abandoned asylum building whose photographed textures shaped the deck's original artwork, carrying the deck's own imagery into the name of the business built to publish it.

Valenza operates from Eastern Long Island, New York, the same region whose graveyards and derelict buildings supplied the deck's visual source material, keeping the business's base of operations tied to the physical place the cards themselves were built from rather than relocating toward a publishing center. Running the company himself rather than working through an established mind body spirit press keeps licensing, reprints and any future expansion of the Deviant Moon line under his own direct control.

That arrangement sets him apart from tarot creators who license a finished deck to an established publisher and step back from its ongoing business; Valenza's teenage art project became not just a published deck but a small, self directed publishing company still run from the region that inspired it.