Corina Dross and Jocelyn (Jo) Mosser are artists, sisters, and close friends. Though they both enjoy many mediums, Jocelyn has a special affinity for painting and Corina for drawing. Jocelyn's oil paintings of skies, faces, and horizons are well-loved in Western North Carolina, where they've shown at Flow Gallery in Marshall, and been commissioned by High Five Coffee Bar. Corina is best known for graphic linework and her illustrated playing cards, "Portable Fortitude." She sells her work nationally at stores, craft fairs, and zine fests.

In 2011, Jocelyn had a brilliant idea: a calendar for the coming year called "2012: The Last Calendar You'll Ever Need." (Remember when people thought 2012 might be the end times?) Corina spent that summer in Asheville with her sister, and started to doodle animals taking over the human world. She gave Jocelyn some finished sketches to see how she would paint them. After a few experiments, it was clear that something magical was happening. They created an internal philosophy for their imagery (wildness vs. civilization, endings and beginnings, astrology and the wheel of the seasons), and what began as a whimsical idea blossomed into a twelve-month wall calendar, printed and sold in a limited edition. The twelve playfully apocalyptic images, complete with stargazing raccoons, moths destroying electrical towers, and a giant slow loris poised over a city, have remained popular as prints.

Every year since the first "last" calender, Jocelyn and Corina have teamed up to make a limited-edition calendar for the next year. Rather than repeat what worked once, they begin each project with new questions and genuine curiosity about what will happen. Their collaborations vary in style each year, but each has its own themes and philosophy: one described a sequence of digestion and focused on breaking through obstacles, another called in abundance by adding more crows each month. That calendar, called "Abacus Corvus" (a play on the idea of counting crows), was what gave the partnership its name.

What makes Abacus Corvus unique isn't just that the artists are sisters, or that they take creative risks. Jocelyn and Corina both have a lifelong commitment to healing, and draw on the same sensitivies and attunement they use in their healing practices when they make art. This can lead to unusual creative habits, especially when working towards a print deadline, as they make space for the unknown and the current moment to be heard. Their 2015 calendar, "Everything Is Unfolding Perfectly," resulted from trusting this kind of process; the resulting images are more ethereal and sophisticated than in earlier years. The demand for that calendar led it to sell out in a few short months.

For the 2017 Calendar: Safe Passage, the creative process took Corina and Jocelyn into a slightly difference direction: making each month's image a healing spell for humanity, and sewing the spell right into the painting. They've also started writing blogs about each month's spell and meditations for working with it.