Comments on: The Postage Stamps of Donald Evans

The Postage Stamps of Donald Evans

plep — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 01:04:09 -0800

The Postage Stamps of Donald Evans (scroll down a paragraph or two) A rich and complex internal world expressed through postage stamp art.
'When Donald Evans (born Morristown, New Jersey USA in 1945) was a boy, he drifted from his hobby of collecting postage stamps to creating his own postage stamps of countries he made up in his imagination ... He left behind an astonishing planet seen through its nations' postage stamps, thousands of them, all drawn to postage-stamp size, with all the familiar periphery of postage stamps hand-done ... '

By: plep

plep — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 01:08:08 -0800

More Donald Evans.

By: MiguelCardoso

MiguelCardoso — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 01:17:21 -0800

Amazing! There's something deeply self-centred and world-ordering about his work - and yet it's compulsive to look at and even charming. Cheers, plep!

By: taz

taz — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 02:44:15 -0800

These are wonderful. Judging by the number of pages dedicated to it, the concept of stamp art seems to be immensely engaging to many of us - perhaps it's man's fascination with the miniature combined with the mystique of a travelling, public art form. Just for fun, here are a couple of interesting themed stamp-art sites I've stumbled across recently: Alphbetilately and Philip Burns' Cryptozoology and Philately pages.

By: hama7

hama7 — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 02:54:04 -0800

Evans drifted to Europe and eventually settled in a windmill near Amsterdam. His creation of imaginary stamps (and lands) calls to mind the work of Joseph Cornell, who obsessed artistically about Europe, a land he would never visit. Nice post!

By: PenDevil

PenDevil — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 03:23:40 -0800

I gotta get me some Marx and Lennon (the true fathers of communism!) stamps.

By: taratan

taratan — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 03:26:45 -0800

Marvelous post. And thanks. It brought back fond memories of my granddad who passed away some 20 years ago. He loved collecting stamps which he would put in small boxes instead of albums. In fact, my first geography lesson was through the stamps he collected from many parts of the world.

By: troutfishing

troutfishing — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 03:38:21 -0800

This reminds me of the site (Mefi post, I think, can't find the link at the moment) by the guy who colllects anti-US war stamps.

By: octobersurprise

octobersurprise — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 05:43:16 -0800

Bruce Chatwin, another life-long prose miniaturist, reviewed the first edition of the Eisenhart book in "The Album of Donald Evans." The essay is available for pay from the New York Review of Books (where it first appeared) but it's also (if I remember right) in Chatwin's book What am I doing here. Yet another miniaturist, even stranger than Evans, perhaps, is Luigi Serafini. Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus is a pictorial encyclopedia of his own bizzare imaginary world, written entirely in an imaginary language.

By: kliuless

kliuless — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 05:57:15 -0800

JSG boggs draws his own money! but not without controversy :D

By: ScottUltra

ScottUltra — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 06:40:32 -0800

Yes, kliuless. J.S.G. Boggs is on about the same level as Donald Evans, although with a slightly different bent to his work. It seems more self-conscious -- not quite as innocent. That being said, i wouldn't hesitat e for a second to accept a Boggs-produced bill as payment for anything. Fascinating!c

By: madamjujujive

madamjujujive — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 07:59:14 -0800

Great post. plep! And for all the amateur doodlers out there who might like to turn stamp sketches to the real thing, here's how the U. S. Post Office selects its subject matter - if you are a designer who'd like an assignment to design a stamp, write for the brochure.

By: IshmaelGraves

IshmaelGraves — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 08:06:02 -0800

Very cool. As a lifelong addict of obsessive mental constructs (constructed languages, imaginary worlds and mythologies, fabricated secret societies a la the Anta and Foucault's Pendulum, micropatrology, etc.), I love this stuff. Evans particularly hated The World for its absence of dirigibles. Who can blame him?

By: silusGROK

silusGROK — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 09:15:17 -0800

I just wish our stamps were this beautiful... US stamps are just so damn ugly.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 11:36:29 -0800

And of course there are the wonderful imagined stamps (and stationery, and countries...) of Nick Bantock. And then there's the Republic of Lomar...

By: Dean King

Dean King — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 12:38:01 -0800

Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn

By: t r a c y

t r a c y — Tue, 29 Oct 2002 06:04:23 -0800

feh. nothing beats last year's official canada post stamp of my kitten zasu.

By: Kikkoman

Kikkoman — Tue, 29 Oct 2002 06:48:02 -0800

Make your own.

By: hattifattener

hattifattener — Tue, 29 Oct 2002 19:39:54 -0800

Hey, I think the recently issued U.S. bat stamps are pretty.