Calendar Girl

"Oh, my God, look,” my daughter says. “I know that one.”

She’s staring at a painting of a brilliant orange-colored flower, its oversized pistil and stamen right smack in front of her face. She walks closer to the canvas. I know that if she weren’t in this big New York City museum on the Upper East Side with its guards in every room, she would probably extend her hand. Since she’s an adult, she would stop before her fingertips touch the surface. But her child self would have gone for it.

Tamara has lived in New York for a few years now, so this is her turf. When we were planning my visit, the first thing she proposed we do together was see the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit at the Whitney. So here we are, traipsing through rooms and rooms and rooms of, it seems like, thousands of O’Keeffes—although when I read the catalog later, it says more like 125.

My daughter grew up on a dirt road hundreds of miles from galleries or museums, but she can spot a Picasso, or a Degas, Monet, Warhol, O’Keeffe anywhere. Actually, she can identify almost any artist whose work graced a calendar. She might be pretty good at some obscure artists, too, if they showed at a gallery whose mailing list our name was on. Sometimes I’d sign Tamara up; other times it would be one of her brothers. They all loved to get mail. Postcards arrived pretty regularly, announcing exhibits in Maine or Massachusetts, even more distant places if a friend had added our name to a list.

Although I grew up in Boston with museums nearby, my folks never took me and I knew little about art. But once I had children, I just knew they should be surrounded by it, and so, the postcards and the calendars.

Once we had crested into a new year, for a few dollars I could buy 12 months of artwork. Every January, I bought more than one and hung a calendar in the kitchen, one in the living room, often the bedrooms, too. For years, an O’Keeffe calendar was part of the annual mix.
But the magic happened afterwards when we framed an image from January or November, some month I loved or one of the kids loved. I couldn’t afford enough cheap frames so we learned to be selective, to consider the work, what we liked about it, why we wanted one to hang instead of another.

Reproductions are not the same as the real thing. The brushstrokes, the texture, the luminosity of the paint are all missing. But still, we’re all pretty good at articulating what it is we see in a painting or drawing, a photograph, and what the energy is that draws us in or pushes us out.

“Look,” Tamara says. “She painted this one in 1916. Do you see the way the light moves?”

“I’m pretty sure that was when she first came to New York,” I say. Throughout the hours we are here, looping around and back and through the rooms again and again, we talk about color, lines, life—O’Keeffe’s and hers and mine.

We are near the end, standing together, shoulder to shoulder, staring at one that says it is in a “private collection.”

Tamara laughs and says, “We had a private collection, too.”

“Still do,” I say, as I recall the box of framed calendar pages in my closet back in Bangor. I’m pretty sure O’Keeffe’s orange poppy is in there, too.

For the second year in a row, Annaliese Jakimides’ work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poem “Women Wear Aprons” was originally part of a series presented in the multimedia performance Behind the Apron, and was published in the journal Off the Coast. This month, her “If I Lived Here” essay debuts in Maine Ahead magazine.