Professional artist Chris Calle again will design the official show cachets for Great American Stamp Show 2024. He also will be at the American First Day Cover Society (AFDCS) booth during the show to autograph covers and stamps with his designs and chat with collectors.

Calle (right) speaking with a collector at the AFDCS booth at GASS 2023.

During his 20+ years as an illustrator his artwork focused on historical subjects and the theme of Space Exploration produced in paint and pencil for publications, advertising, coins and FDCs. Chris has designed more than 35 postage stamps for the United States and hundreds more for countries as diverse as Sweden and the Marshall Islands, as well as designs for the United Nations. Chris’s US postage stamp design work includes the two stamps celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the first Moon Landing jointly designed with his father Paul Calle who designed the iconic #C76 First Man on the Moon stamp in 1969. Perhaps Chris’s most well-known solo artwork is the $2.40 Priority Mail stamp design of 1989 (Sc. 2419), which depicts Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planting the American flag on the Moon. 

Perhaps Chris' best-known U.S. stamp, Sc. 2419 Moon Landing 20th Anniversary Priority Mail.  

For more than a decade Chris has designed the show cachets for the major U.S. summer stamp collecting shows as well as many regional stamp shows throughout the country.

Among other stamp and cover design awards, Chris' first day cover cachets have won the top prize in the annual AFDCS contest several times and he has now passed the torch of cachetmaking to his children Arianna and Ian. Since they were five years old, Arianna and Ian's entires in the youth category have both won many awards in the AFDCS contest. In fact, two years ago Arianna took first place in an adult category. She is now a sophomore in college!

Today in his fine art career Calle’s oil paintings and pencil drawings focus on the history and future of manned space exploration.

The first U.S. stamp designed by Chris Calle, the 20-cent Harry S. Truman definitive of 1984.

As an official NASA artist, Chris covered two of the early Space Shuttle missions, producing artwork that is now in the collections of the National Air and Space Museum and NASA. His artwork is in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian museums, other space and science Museums throughout the United States, and corporate and private collections worldwide.

Chris is the author of Celebrating Apollo 11, the Artwork of Paul Calle, which details the elder Calle’s involvement in the NASA Fine Art Program and focuses on the on-the-spot artwork Paul created as the only artist present during the breakfast and suiting up of the Apollo 11 crew on the morning of their historic launch to the Moon.

Chris portrayed his father Paul in the 2018 movie "First Man," the story of Neil Armstrong. Chris sketched Ryan Gosling and the cast during the breakfast and crew walkout, using the same sketchbook and pens Paul used in 1969.

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