The Landscape of Painting

The World Seen Through the Postage Stamps of Donald Evans

In 1977, not long after I started working with hand-carved rubber stamps and printing with drawing ink, I had the idea to commemorate everyday objects with my own postage stamps. In coming up with this idea I was very much influenced by Claes Oldenberg’s sculptures, such as this one. (Question: how many of you are old enough to remember typewriter erasers? How quaint this is.)

I did a series of pages of postage stamps, commemorating important objects like The Fedora, The Safety Pin, and The Paint Roller. I printed the stamps on paper with hand-carved rubber stamps and I used a large sewing needle to make the perforations between the “stamps”. I seem to remember that I set the postage at 19 cents, which was really expensive then because at the time postage for a letter was something like 13 cents and had been for a long time. I added some cost for the sake of future viewers. That’s funny schtuff, now. Fortunately for me, I sold all of these pieces. Unfortunately, I lost my slides of these pieces many moves ago, and can’t show them to you.

Not long after I showed my stamps in a gallery I met someone at an opening who asked me if I’d ever heard of Donald Evans, an artist from New Jersey who painted his own postage stamps. I hadn’t, and frustratingly there was no internet for me to Google him and his artwork. It happened, though, that a book called The World of Donald Evans was published in 1980, three years after his tragic death in a fire in Amsterdam at age 31. I bought the book as soon as I learned about it, and it’s still one of my favorite possessions.

Although I’ve never been a collector of stamps, I’ve admired them for their variety of shapes and subjects for commemoration. Evans was, I learned, a collector from an early age on, and as his work as an artist evolved he kept returning to his stamp collection for inspiration. Finally he started to create his own stamps, painting them with watercolors, and using hand-carved rubber erasers to hand-cancel the stamps.

This one is close to my heart because I grow basil in the summer and make a legendary pesto.

He memorialized all kinds of things that were unlikely to really be memorialized: Vegetables, quilts, short-order foods and dominoes. He made up his own countries,often derived from the names of friends. Some stamps he put together as collections; others he showed as canceled stamps on addressed envelopes or postcards. His teeny watercolors are exquisite, and his calligraphy handsome.

Evans’ work is an inspiration to me still, and I’m sad that his life ended so early. I try to imagine where his work would have taken him more than thirty years on.

Tags: postage stamps, Watercolors

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 11:15 am and is filed under Influential artists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.