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siehe auch die Originalassoziation unten, unter dem englischen Text über Donald Evans.
Donald Evans was an American artist (1945–1977), who was known for creating hand-painted postage stamps (artistamps) of fictional countries. Evans died in a fire in the Netherlands in 1977.
While Evans initially painted postage stamps as a child, he returned to making them in 1971, shortly after graduating from Cornell University and training as an architectural designer with Richard Meier and Associates in New York City. During a six-year period from 1971–1977, he painted faux stamps issued by forty-two countries he conjured in his imagination.
To make his art, Evans usually traced each stamp design in pencil, then completed it with a No. 2 Grumbacher paintbrush, watercolor, and pen and ink. To simulate stamp perforations, Evans pounded out a series of periods on an old typewriter.
Evans catalogued all of his creations in a book he called the Catalogue of the World, which resembled a stamp-collecting catalogue in layout and style.
Evans traveled widely during the six-year period in which he painted professionally, often renting small flats or staying with friends. Given the tiny scale of his art, he could pack an entire gallery exhibition under his arm. He enjoyed considerable success while he was alive, and had solo gallery shows in Amsterdam, London, New York, Paris and Washington, D.C.
On April 29, 1977, Evans’s Amsterdam apartment building caught fire. He did not escape. But after his death his reputation continued to grow, particularly after the publication of Willy Eisenhart’s The World of Donald Evans in 1980 (followed by a second edition in 1994). Several prominent critics and authors have admired Evans’s work, including Bruce Chatwin, Adam Gopnik and Nick Bantock.
Chatwin's admiration was effusive: »By common consent, the art of the drop-out generation is a mess -- and the art of Donald Evans is the antithesis of mess. Nor is it niggling. Nor is it precious. Yet I can't think of another artist who expressed more succinctly and beautifully the best aspirations of those years: the flight from war and the machine; the asceticism; the nomadic restlessness; the yearning for sensual cloud-cuckoo-lands; the retreat from public into private obsessions, from the big and noisy to the small and still.«
Evans's stamps can be found in many museums and private collections.
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neo schrieb am 6.5. 2002 um 22:53:06 Uhr über
Yteke
Auf der Hafenpromenade von Geest, der Hauptstadt von Yteke, steht ein Monument. Es stellt scheinbar einen Fotografen dar, der sein Stativ aufgebaut hat und durch die Kamera schaut. So sieht es von weitem aus.
Kommt man näher, wird daraus die überlebensgroße Skulptur eines Malers.
Das Stativ wird zur Staffelei, die Kamera zu einer kleinen Leinwand. Der Maler beugt sich, mit dem Pinsel in der Hand, über ein winziges Bild.
Leider ist das Gesicht (bärtig, mit großen traurigen Augen) kaum zu erkennen: der Bildhauer hat die Figur des Malers (mangels Talent?) in einem dicken Pelz, unter einer großen Pelzmütze versteckt.
Auf dem Sockel steht:
Donald Evans
* 28.8.1945 Morristown (New Jersey)
+ 29.4.1977 Amsterdam
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