postage stamps from Republica de Banana, and Nadorp, by Donald Evans

Oh certainly, go right ahead and click on

the image and perhaps it will become larger.

But not too much larger. The American artist and architect Donald Evans painted -- watercolors mostly -- his postage stamps the size of ordinary postage stamps, and punched the perforations and did all the mechanicals by hand. When he had a gallery or museum exhibition, he could carry the entire show under one arm.

He lived the last and most productive years of his young life in the Netherlands and travelled obsessively through Europe. Most of his stamps are imaginative reflections of countries we are familiar with, but re-named, and with different emphases. lo Stato di Mangiare (the State of Eating) is Italy, more or less, but obsessed with its great national industry of hundreds of dirigibles floating by in the sky and dragging their cigar-shaped shadows over the landscape. His stamps are themed with delicious fresh fruit and vegetables, beautiful women, and interesting-looking old chairs. The stamps of Licham en Geest (Body and Soul) are the marine mammals of northern Europe. The stamps of Isles des Sourdes (Islands of the Deaf) are hands making sign language words for the numerical denominations of each stamp. The stamps of tropical islands are echoes of the era of European colonial times.

Stamps Copyright © 1980 by the Estate of Donald Evans