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.