Customer Reviews

The World of Donald Evans

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Donald Evans' world was an amazing artistic creation of fictional stamps, painted in watercolour (to scale), in painstaking detail often in the manner of the classic 19th century engraved stamps from the foreign lands he collected as a boy. Evans' tragic death in a fire in Amsterdam, robbed us of a blossoming talent. His legacy is still substantial - over 4,000 stamps, from which this book is compiled.

Evans' incredibly detailed, well-historied issues from his various "cinderella" countries are often so well rendered you'd think they were the real thing. If you were intrigued by the stamps on the letters and postcards in Nick Bantock's "Griffin and Sabine" trilogy, you're ready to enter the world of Donald Evans.

The art world seems to cherish the large; large works, large personalities, large prices. That's why it's good to see the small celebrated, and in the work of Donald Evans, it is celebrated with such elan, that it's impossible to read this book without smiling and even laughing out loud.

Evans was an artist whose work is almost entirely made up of faux postage stamps (postoids, as they're known in mail art circles) celebrating not only fictional countries, but the small things of everyday life: fruit, chickens, garlic, plants and flowers. His postal ephemera is vivid and dryly funny, and conforms to an internal logic and order that is awesome. Leaf through the book and enjoy the stamps from Achterdijk celebrating windmills, or the block of four pesto stamps from Mangiare. During his short life his output was prodigious, his imagination remarkable.

If you like the work of Nick Bantock, Donald Evans will be just your style.

Donald Evans was an amazing artist - well beyond just the watercolor and paint. He managed to create histories, cultures and insights into places that seem so real, yet never really existed. His work reminds visually of creativity and expression graphically that Rudyard Kipling gave us with words.

The book arrived very quickly and in the exact condition I expected it. This artist is fascinating in his invention of fictitious nations often named after friends. The catalog sized book is full of postage stamps he painted in actual size as if they were issued by the same countries. Some stamps were franked and some had cancellations. A very unusual expression of artistic talent.

I bought this item as a holiday gift for my artist, sister. It was stated as used but in good condition. It looked like new. It is a hard to find as it is out-of-print but highly regarded by critics. I considered this a very lucky find.

To be able to be so interested in such a singular imagery, that is to create a world within a world, is that which writer's do well.
And for the visual, image making artist to do so certainly does not surprise me either.
But, to come upon the adult artist still engaged in his childhood fantasy is totally deliightful.
To have the opportunity to see the many, many sets of postal stamp creations, the scenes, and the countries imagined in such a simple straight forward way, is to know that today's culture can still produce the artist whom does not need to impress by 'socking you in the face' for dramatic effect.
Whether you are an artist and or an art lover, I suggest that you spend a day or so with this delightful book. I think that you will come away better understanding the child in the adult artist better.
Too bad, too sad, for he & we, that he did not get to live out a long life ......... as who knows what his maturity might have produced?
EMW, artist, 4-5-10.