Ivory Cats 2011 Calendar [カレンダー]

The Ivory Calendars are always beautiful and this one is truly lovely. I can't imagine starting a new year without a new Ivory Calendars. The old ones (and I have eleven) are never thrown away but looked at occasionally. For in fact they are art.

Lesley Ivory is my favorite painter of cats. I have purchased these calendars and other products featuring her artwork for more than 20 years. Of all the painters producing widely distributed calendar art, I believe that she stands alone in her superb ability to capture the spirit and personality of her subjects. Other painters, though good, simply do not depict the accurate body language and facial expressions of cats nearly as well as she does. When I look at a painting done by Ms. Ivory, I get a sense of the cat as an individual, as a "person" -- not merely as an "animate object" that has been portrayed on canvas.

That said, I am rather disappointed in the reproduction quality of some of the images used in this calendar. As in the past, this calendar combines a variety of images painted by Ms. Ivory over her career, a number of which have been featured in calendars and other products previously. For example, paintings of her beautiful calico cat Agneatha, featured as the January and October images in this calendar, date back 20 years or more. Therein seems to lie a problem.

It appears that some of the older images featured in this year's calendar were reproduced from old printing separations originally created long ago and which have deteriorated over time, or, perhaps, reproduced from secondary sources such as old calendar pages or prints. The result of this is that, in some of the images, the white and lighter-colored highlights are completely washed out and much detail is lost. The most noticeable example of this is the painting "Blossom in the Dandelions," the July image. Even worse, there are small black scratches running across this particular image and a large, black, noticeable piece of "lint" on poor Blossom's hindquarters. This is the result of poor quality control in printing. With the technology available today, there really is no excuse for this sort of thing.

Don't get me wrong -- the affected images are still beautiful paintings. But I have never seen such quality-control problems with reproductions of Ms. Ivory's work before and it is very disappointing to see lovely paintings reproduced in substandard fashion. Not all the paintings in the calendar are affected, but the ones that are affected lower the quality of the calendar as a whole.

If you are a die-hard Ivory fancier, the loss of some quality in reproduction may matter not one bit to you. If you don't have a background that makes the quality-control issues obvious to you, you may not even notice them. But I can see them all too well and they bothered me. I suspect that Ms. Ivory, with her keen, keen eye for detail, might be bothered by them as well.

My rating for Ms. Ivory and her paintings is five stars and then some. This particular calendar, however, is disappointing as it simply does not always measure up to the presentation standards that the original paintings deserve.

I usually give my mom a calendar for Christmas, and she loves her kitties like I do. This was such a big and beautiful calendar I was SO tempted to keep it for myself... but I didn't :( I love Lesley Anne Ivory's art!