Pilliard Dickle
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Cartoonist Pilliard Dickle is best known for the unusual poster calendars he draws. Each one is based on a different theme: castles, palaces, ships, pyramids, trains, planets. The Associated Press describes Dickle's calendars as "a yearlong trip through a cartoon fantasy land."
Pilliard Dickle is not only the artist's pen name (his real name is Joe Chandler) but a character in the calendars - a sort of chronological Marco Polo on a mission is to explore the future and make detailed drawings of the years he discovers.
Each of Dickle's calendars is accompanied by a story. It's the artist's illustrated diary of his travels through time. The calendars are set in a land called Calendaria, populated by a cast of characters with names like Captain Navaron Tyme, Sonny Day and his wife Doris (no relation) and The Daybreaker, who goes from year to year stealing Tuesdays. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes the calendars as "forms of creative fiction," adding that looking over a Pilliard Dickle calendar is "somewhat akin to reading a picaresque novel."
After selling his calendars at art shows throughout the eastern US, Dickle rose to national attention when movie critic Gene Shalit delivered a startlingly rave review of his calendars on The Today Show on NBC in 1986, devoting more time to Dickle's calendars than all other calendars combined. This, plus a spate of other media attention, brought Dickle a small but faithful legion of collectors around the world.
His calendars and stories have been published as a book, The Calendar World of Pilliard Dickle (Longstreet Press, Atlanta,1989). The Calendar Marketing Association awarded Dickle's 2005 calendar The World Calendar Award as Most Original Poster calendar.
Dickle attributes his unusual calendar art to a condition he has had since childhood called synesthesia, a perceptual anomaly that affects about one in 25,000 people. It’s a cross-wiring of the senses that occurs in the left hemisphere of the brain. A person with synesthesia may hear colors, taste sounds or feel shapes. In Dickle’s case, he says he vizualizes the passage of time.
“Ever since I was a child, I’ve had a visual concept of time,” Dickle explained in the newsletter he mails to his collectors.”Days, weeks and months have distinct shapes and colors. If somebody says, ‘I’ll see you next Tuesday,’ I picture WHERE Tuesday is. I see its shape and color.”
Pilliard Dickle is most often misspelled Pillard Dickle.
The artist's website:
