These
tiny artworks can’t be used for postage, but they do send a message.
Atlas Obscura July 13, 2017
Iles Des Sourds. 1964. Coquilles de
mer, 1974, Donald Evans Courtesy Estate
of Donald Evans and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York
The stamps issued in the tropical
archipelago of Amis and Amants show a series of arcane islands in miniature
watercolors. The sea sweeps the empty beaches of Outburst of Tenderness. Palm
trees wave beneath stormy skies on the isle of First Love. From the shores of
Fair Weather Friend a distant volcanic peak is visible on the horizon. On the
island of Hand-in-Hand, mountains slope down to neatly ploughed fields.
These are Cinderella stamps;
artifacts that look like stamps but aren’t. These islands of love and
friendship don’t exist. They were painted by the American artist Donald Evans,
who made thousands of stamps for 42 imaginary countries over a short, bright
career, before his death in a house fire in 1977 at the age of 33.
Sabot.
Poste Maritime., nd, Donald Evans.
Cinderella stamps can be anything
from propaganda messages or charity labels to local stamps for obscure islands
and tiny towns. You can’t send a letter through the official post with a
Cinderella because they have no legal value, but that’s the attraction. It
means anyone can make them, and the only restriction on what you can put on
them is the stamp-maker’s imagination. Donald Evans was the king of the
artistamp, a form of Cinderella made as an artistic work.
Artist Ginny Lloyd has been making
artistamps under the pseudonym Gina Lotta since 1975. “An artistamp is a little
museum,” she says. “You create an exhibit within a sheet of stamps. There’s
complete freedom in what you want the content to be. They can have a political
message, commemorate events from your life, whatever you want. I make sheets of
stamps for people I know who’ve died. Some artists make them to distribute their
work outside of the gallery system. Others mimic real stamps as a political
commentary; some have had the Secret Service visit them for counterfeiting.
Artistamps subvert in a quiet way. You have to look closely to see if they’re
real or not.”
Gina Lotta
Post Space Series. Courtesy Ginny Lloyd
As a kid Donald Evans built cities
from cardboard, complete with houses and highways, churches and traffic. To
make his imaginary worlds more real he wrote letters from them and made stamps
to put on the envelopes. In the 1950s, between the ages of 10 and 15, he made
hundreds of stamps, recording them in detail in his Catalogue of the World. He
abandoned his hobby as a teenager, returning to it as an artist only once the
cultural landscape had been transformed by Pop Art. (If it was okay to paint
soup cans and comic strips, maybe it was okay to
paint fake stamps.) Donald Evans dug out his childhood catalogues and began
making stamps again.
He created countries to mark
elements of his own life. Anything could be transformed into geography: a meal;
a game of dominoes; a dance; a dinner party; a surname; a pair of shoes, a
friendship, a love affair. His stamp issues minutely explored bird’s eggs,
Chinese plates, Indonesian vegetables, alphabets, penguins, pasta, mushrooms,
windmills, quilts, chairs and shells. To make his stamps look real he carved
erasers to make postmarks and mounted his work on envelopes he distressed and
addressed.
He kept the details of the lands he
thought up deliberately and tantalizingly vague. He wanted viewers to step
through these tiny doorways into worlds of their own imagination. These were
vast territories, large enough to encompass all interpretations.
For other artistamp makers the form
has been a way of making more political points. Unlike mass-produced official
stamps, Cinderellas are hyper-local, often reflecting the personal
preoccupations of the artist. Stamps traditionally commemorate the proud moments
of a country, but Cinderellas can subvert that, marking the shameful or the
perverse.
Achterdijk. 1966. Pears of
Achterdijk (Fondante de Charneu of Legipont),1972, Donald Evans
Artist Karl Schwesig drew faux
stamps while imprisoned in 1940 at the Gurs concentration camp in southern
France. He drew what he saw around him; the barbed wire, the guards; the
bodies, the coffins heading for the burial ground. In the 1960s the Fluxus
experimental art movement started using used stamps and mail art as a form of
‘living art’, a collaborative, anti-commercial medium that they sent out into
the world instead of displaying in a gallery. Canadian conceptual artist Anna
Banana, whose work satirises authority by parodying its symbols and concepts
using the humble, humorous and nonsensical banana, produced a series of
banana-themed stamps. Russian artist Natalie Lamanova has used stamps to
explore issues of identity, ownership and control in 1990s post-Soviet Russia.
American mail artist Otto David Sherman has been making stamps since the 1970s
that highlight the disparity between the way nations represent themselves in
official imagery and the actual actions of their rulers, depicting corrupt
politicians and despots and showing first-world leaders in farcical poses;
Vladimir Putin in a top hat, Donald Trump juxtaposed with a chimpanzee.
The
artistamp community today is a DIY culture of makers swapping stamps through
the post, mixing up drawing with image-editing software, color printing with
pinking shears, internet forums with the traditional mail network. For a new
generation it’s retaliation against the global with the super-local, against
the mass-produced with the slow-made.
Adjudane. 1922. Pictorals, 1972, Donald Evans.
Mail art creator Vittore Baroni has
said that “Artistamps rebel against the monopoly of governmental emissions,
claiming the right for everyone to self-produce and issue virtual values in any
possible shape, number and subject.”
The countries Donald Evans created
were peaceful, their politics idealized. The Island of the Deaf is a silent
paradise with a capital called Hand-Talk. The country of Stein with its capital
Gertrude is a literary dictatorship with 100 percent literacy. The imperial
kingdom of Caluda emerges from a native takeover as the new independent state
of Katibo, the Sudanese dialect word for a black man who sets himself free. He
told the Paris Review in 1975 that his stamps were a “vicarious traveling for
me to a made-up world that I like better than the one I’m in. No catastrophes
occur. There are no generals or battles or warplanes on my stamps. The
countries are innocent, peaceful, composed.”
Gina Lotta Post Future Series. Courtesy Ginny Lloyd
Ginny Lloyd sees in the artistamp an
echo of a childhood fascination with unknown worlds. “The excitement I feel
when I receive artistamps in the post is the same excitement I used to feel as
a child when I would get packages of loose stamps for my collection. I would
spend hours looking at all of these beautiful places outside of my very small
town, dreaming about travel. I wanted to know more about other worlds and this
was one of the ways I learned.”
The art of Donald Evans was subject
to a raft of self-imposed restrictions. He only painted stamps, always in the
same sizes with frequently recurring themes, in washed out colors painted with
the same brush. He used this sameness, this deliberate smallness, to explore
the infinite. His stamps are pieces of physical evidence sent directly from the
limitless landscape of the imagination.
For more information about artistamps and a gallery of work by many artists regularly updated see https://artistampmuseum.blogspot.com/ Books on the topic are also available.
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