This year I ordered a Georgia O’Keefe 2005 Calendar online, having been a slowcoach and letting January slip by without getting a new calendar for the year. It arrived last Friday, and it’s beautiful:

I do love her paintings, particularly her later more abstract landscapes.I used to like getting a UNICEF wall calendar each year, the kind that has drawings done by children from all over the world, but they were all gone. So was everything except dog or cat breed calendars, and even for half-price, and if I were obsessed with siamese cats, I don’t want to look at everyday siamese cat photographs all year. In fact I’ve never really understood why so many calendars have so little visual variety, except that I suspect they provide an easy avenue for Christmas shoppers, who can think ‘Oh, Auntie Mary loves cats, this will do for her’.Calendars that feature artistic interpretations of a single topic stand a better chance of being interesting, as long as you particularly like the style in which they are done, or there is some variation of style in the 12 illustrations. For example, in 2003 I had a calendar I loved, a cat calendar by Nicola Bayley. Its selection includes drawings from Bayley’s books The Necessary Cat: A Celebration of Cats in Picture and Word, Fun with Mrs Thumb, Katje, the Windmill Cat, and The Mousehole Cat, and although there are cats in all of them, and they all show Bayley’s exquisite attention to detail and the decorative, they tell so many different stories.

Nicola Bayley’s drawings have been a favourite of mine since my children were small; we had two of her books: The Mouldy, and The Patchwork Cat (written by William Mayne). When I was the illustrator for the Republic of Pemberley in the 90’s, the cat drawing that I did for the Portrait of our Community board was inspired by those in The Patchwork Cat.