The World of Donald Evans

Very fine copy in wraps with some light shelf wear, clean with no markings, second edition.

A collection of personal stamps from countries invented by the artist, his miniature art reproductions done to scale.

The remarkable American miniature stamp watercolorist Donald Evans was a nomadic traveloguer of a wholly fictional yet unquestionably lush global community. Evan’s imaginative stamp paintings began in his youth when he was a novice stamp collector. As an adult world traveller he continued to innovate beautifully executed whimsical stamps.

In 1975, he told the Paris Review, “It was vicarious traveling for me to a made-up world that I liked better than the one I was in. I’m doing that now, too. No catastrophes occur. There are no generals or battles or warplanes on my stamps. The countries are innocent, peaceful, composed. Sometimes I get so concentrated in these worlds I get confused. … It’s hard to get out.”

But in the end, a catastrophe impinged after all. On April 29, 1977, the Amsterdam apartment house where Evans lived caught fire. He died at 31, a stone’s throw from his beloved windmills and dykes.

His life was like one of his own miniature works of art: a dreamscape incorporating the banana trees, shells and bird eggs he treasured, framed by a border of banged-out black dots, painstakingly, lovingly worked out with a Grumbacher number two brush.

$ 35.00