|
Dickle: What? That's ridiculous! I don't have any "seventh ex-wife". And I've never even been in a movie, let alone take off my...
Dickle: Weird. For one thing, it gets mispronounced a lot. The trick is to remember that "Pilliard" rhymes with "billiard," and "Dickle" rhymes with "pickle." For another thing, people don't even believe it's my real name!
Dickle: Well, no.
Dickle: I'd just finished drawing my first calendar—it was a space scene, a lot like the one I reissued for 2001—and I left a spot down in the corner for the signature. But it just didn't seem like something a "Joe Chandler" would draw. So I took a break for lunch and made a baloney sandwich, and just as I bit into a dill pickle..
Dickle: Well, that's a little harder to pinpoint. I don't have a story about biting into something that rhymes with "calendar." But time, to me, as always been visual. That is, I picture the shapes and colors of days, weeks and months. And I still do. If you say "I'll see you next Tuesday," I picture where Tuesday is in relation to the shape of the week.
Dickle: Red.
Dickle: Sure. September is sort of an eggshell color.
Dickle: Not, not really. The images that automatically pop up in my mind are illogical shapes. Sort of like M.C. Escher concoctions. I'm not sure if I could even describe them.
Dickle: When I made my first calendars I had no idea if I could sell any at all. So I rolled a few under my arm and went into this art gallery in Atlanta and asked them if they'd be interested. They sort of smirked at each other and said with a dry little laugh: "no."
PDR: So I guess that was the end of that. Dickle: It was disillusioning. But as I walked
out I passed some painters standing out in front of the gallery. Not
arty painters, but the kind with ladders and white overalls who paint
houses. One of them said, "Hey, what's that you got there?"
I showed them the calendar and started telling them the story about
what all was going on in it, and they bought a couple right there on
the spot. That's when it began to dawn on me that my real market was
not with institutions but with real live people.
Dickle: At art shows. I seem to be incapable of
rendering a drawing without simultaneously creating a story to go along
with it. So the first year I exhibited my calendars at a show, naturally
I'd start telling people what the characters in it were up to. People
often asked, "Do you come along with the calendar to tell about
it?" That's when I got the idea to start writing the stories down. PDR: Tell me a little about the stories Dickle: They're all set in a faraway land called Calendaria. It's inhabited by a cast of characters called, needless to say, the Calendarians. The stories tie together from one year to the next so that each new calendar is a further episode in a continuing adventure through time.
PDR: How about a quick profile of one of your "Calendarians"?
Dickle: "Calendaria."
Dickle: Right. I'm sort of a roving reporter—or rather a roving calendar artist—traveling through Calendaria on a mission to explore the future and send back drawings of the picturesque years I discover along the way. I also keep and illustrated diary of all the odd occurrences I encounter.
Dickle: I have no talent for rendering likenesses of actual people. I wish I did. It'd be fun to draw my friends into the calendars. I do occasionally put in a famous person, but only one who is easy to draw. For me, that means somebody who's laden with external adornments, like glasses, mustache, hat—stuff like that. PDR: Like whom? Dickle: Well, I drew Gene Shalit in one of my earlier calendars. This was before he put them on the Today Show. And once I was drawing a character who started resembling Father Guido Sarducci... so, I let it be him! I do put my daughter, Emily, in the calendars, whether it be a drawing of her or just her name. One year you had to turn the calendar upside down to find her name. Another year it was spelled out in sign language. Sometimes the name is hidden in all the zillions of little dots I stipple in. But this is not something I generally let be known.
Dickle: It's off the record. I'm sure you won't mention it.
Dickle: In 1994 David Boyd, the syndicated cartoonist who draws the illustrations for Jeff Foxworthy's You Might Be a Redneck If... books, loaned me one of his redneck characters for a guest appearance. The story was that he'd wandered into the wrong calendar and was trying to find his way back to his redneck calendar .
Dickle: That used to be true. Then after twenty
years of living as a creative hermit, I met Natalie Bishop and whammo,
it was creative magic. We started collaborating on calendars, Mind Control
Telephone (it's a telephone that takes control of your mind), a children's
book and all sorts of other fun stuff. Dickle: Don't ask.
Dickle: No, she does. She draws in other characters, too. Sometimes I'll be working on a calendar and I'll walk in the room with a pen and pad and say, 'Hey, would you sketch me some people?' Natalie's contributions are fun. Her characterizations look a little different from mine, but our styles are close enough to mix 'n match. And her style has influenced mine. My stuff was beginning to look a little bubbly and, you know, dated, kinda. Her characters are looser, more, well, today.
Dickle: It's great! In fact, it's so great we've
been married for 13 years. Dickle: You bet. Now we collaborate not just on
creative projects but stuff like taking out the garbage. Dickle: The worst? Hmm... Wild Honey Pie, I guess.
But they were trying to be bad, so that doesn't count. How about Mr.
Moonlight. But wait, they didn't write that one. Didn't Ringo try to
do some country thing? Don't Pass Me By. But that one doesn't count,
either. I mean, it was Ringo. fer cryin' out loud. PDR: I thought it was getting a little boring. Who wants to hear about you and your wife taking out the garbage? Dickle: That's what it's all about, in the end.
Like Wallace Shawn talked about at the end of My Dinner with Andre.
It's Zen! Dickle: Well, if I said Elaine, I'd get to find out what it's like to be a woman. Without crossing gender barrier, though, I guess I'd have to say George Costanza because he's such a great liar and I'm no good at it. Natalie can vouch for that. Plus, I'd have more hair. Don't you have any relevant questions?
Dickle: I'm recording a CD of original songs. Like "I Spotted Spiro Agnew in the Dairy Queen" and "Bubba of Nazareth." And I have a novella coming out called Avocado Avenue. It's about a guy who keeps saying "A Gazebo in the middle of nowhere" over and over for no apparent reason. Then there's The Story of My Nose, an illustrated novel about this guy who discovers that his nose is in his field of vision. And A Novel Without Words, which is just what it says: the characters speak in colors rather than words. The primary colors of light, red, blue and green—and all the variations thereof—constitute their language. Personally, I think it's a really cool book, but of course I as the author can hardly get away with saying so.
Dickle: I'm working on it.
Dickle: Well, I like those Far Side calendars. Cows standing around talking. Ducks with bad attitudes.
Dickle: Hmm... I'm hardly the one to ask. I'm too close to 'em. I guess I'd say the Palace, shown below. It's got a good story.
Dickle: A never ending hodepodge of fun. Excerpts from my illustrated novel-in-progress I've been working on since the Truman administration, cartoons, 3-D t-shirts, phony interviews, stuff like that.
Dickle: Yeah, you know, where you interview yourself
and act like it's somebody else asking the questions.
Dickle: Well, not per se, only in a manner of speaking.
Dickle: Well, I'm not really sure, but I heard Joe Biden use it the other day to dodge a question. Seemed to work for him. |
Don't
ask us how we did it, but The Pilliard Dickle Report has managed
to land an interview with America's cleverest calendar artist.
Dickle:
Well, let's see. There's the Daybreaker. He's this dumpy little scoundrel
who hates Tuesdays, and goes around stealing them from the calendars.
The CIA (that's the Calendarian Intelligence Agency) has been after
him for years, but to no avail. See, when you're living in a calendar,
you can be seen in several different places at the same time. So the
Daybreaker rambles all over Calendaria leaving so many images of himself
from the past, present and future that nobody can tell which is the
past. present or future him. Some people think he's triplets.
PDR:
"Whammo"??
You gotta love 'im. Why
are you asking me that?
|