Calendar Memories As I scroll through the calendar artwork in our seasonal portfolios, it feels as if memories from many years are pieced together like a quilt. Added to my personal memories are the stories many calendar friends have shared with me. Whether filling the wall in a kitchen or pediatrician’s office, hanging over an infant’s crib or a child’s bed, received as a wedding or house warming gift, my calendars became a small part of many people’s days and somehow a reflection of them. Even when printed without lettering, these images give me a feeling for the preciousness of time and the pleasure of everyday things.
Starting Out
Like many young children, I was fascinated by the lovely shapes of letters long before I could join them into words. I would add them to my artwork as mysterious symbols. The beginning of my poster-making career came in the sixth grade with the advent of the felt tipped marker. Later, a favorite high school art teacher taught me a few basic silkscreen skills. Motivation to learn more came from looking at prints by silkscreen artists and wondering how they were made. In college I joined in late night poster making activities, energized by the antiwar movement of the sixties.
After college, a friend and I opened a community silkscreen workshop. I was hired to make a series of posters advertising classes and speakers at a local center for adult education. Producing weekly posters, all in a consistent 11x14 inch format, gave me a chance to experiment with many silkscreen techniques and to develop my own graphic style. People began to collect this work, and it was one such collector who suggested the idea for a large wall calendar made up of individual posters.
In the early seventies, my husband Anthony Giachetti and I moved to coastal Maine and opened a seasonal gallery for his handmade furniture and my silkscreen prints. In 1976, I made my first primitive calendar, complete with black flies in the wet ink. Adapted from the 11x14 inch format of my earlier silkscreen work, it was the first poster calendar of its kind.
Calendar Chronology
The chronology of my calendars can be confusing for collectors. The first four sets were small editions, hand printed with the help of friends and apprentices. Anticipating our first child in 1980, I switched to making watercolor and colored pencil designs which could be reproduced by offset lithography. This allowed for sizable editions and wider distribution through mail order and wholesale accounts. What began as an art project became a publishing business. Our family was growing as well. From 1987 to 1993 I took a break from calendar making to enjoy more time with our three young sons. I then continued for nine more years, retiring in 2001 with a retrospective collection. So, though I made twenty calendars, the time frame covers twenty-seven years.