[.uk] The World of Donald Evans (ISBN 0825296560)

A book to treasure:
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.

If you like Nick Bantock's stamps, you' ll like this...:
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.

Donald Evans:
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.