Dreamers Rise
An Open Notebook
And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight
Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate.
 Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) | |||||
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The following assortment of notes,
musings, proposals for future consideration, lists, and quotations is by
design doubly open: exposed to the reader, but also subject to revision,
expansion, excision in a way that a traditional written journal (or even
a blog) is not.
Aloft (Donald Evans) 
Donald Evans was born in New Jersey in 1945 and died in a fire in the Netherlands in 1977. An avid collector of stamps as a child
— he reportedly amassed a collection of roughly 100,000 of them — he
also took to amusing himself by creating philatelic issues for a number of
fictional countries, eventually filling three albums with his designs. In
his teens, though, as many do, he put aside childish things, and gave it up. He
went off to Cornell University, studied architecture, and took a job with
Richard Meier and Associates, becoming a project supervisor. His interest in his
profession soon waned, however, and couldn't match the remembered joys of his
abandoned hobby. In time, encouraged by friends who were permitted a look at the albums of his old
work, and with improved drafting skills, he began to create new stamps for new imaginary nations, quit
his job, and moved to the Netherlands, where he continued to paint stamps until his death.
Willy Eisenhart's excellent 1980 monograph on the artist, The World of Donald Evans, has a generous selection of the stamps, organized, like any good stamp album, alphabetically by country. Stylistically, Evans usually took inspiration from the monochrome stamp series of the first half of the 20th century, the kind with block letters and a rigid frame surrounding a central image. His subject matter ranged from plants and animals to landscapes, aircraft, windmills, and much more; in each case the choice of subject reflected Evans's conception of the character of its issuing country. Less typical were the stamps created for the nation of Stein, which reproduce text from Tender Buttons, and — a favorite of mine — the series of tiles, with dots corresponding to the denominations, that capture the rigorous abstract essence of Domino. The stamps record familiar landscapes, allude to the particularities of friends (Yteke, a far northern land, honors a friend who disliked warm weather), explore the artist's own fascinations with distant places and peoples. Someone like Evans could very easily have amounted to one of two things: a misfit avoiding the world around him through obsessive pursuits that no one else could really ever share or understand; or a talented hack clever enough to come up with trifling novelties to suit the whims of commerce. In fact, he was neither. Though he had a bit of a reputation for guarding his private life, he seems to have been reasonably well “grounded,” as they say now, and maintained an address book with 2,000 names of friends and acquaintances (perhaps he catalogued them as he did his stamps!). On the other hand, he took no evident shortcuts to please the market, though his work was increasingly embraced by collectors and galleries. Where whimsical variety was appropriate, the stamps abound in it; but when the logic of the form seemed to require painting thirty-six differently colored versions of the same portrait of a woman for all the possible denominations, he stuck to the logic. Evans conceived the stamps in groups, with an eye to how they would work together on a page, and the individual pages, though by now much dispersed, are in turn really just fragments of one continuous whole. It's a little disappointing that there isn't a comprehensive Donald Evans gallery on the web, which would seem like the ideal medium for displaying his designs. There are some images on a page about Evans written by Robert Merkin, and a nice set of palm trees from the island nation of the Tropides, but not much else. The Eisenhart book, which has been re-issued once or twice since its original publication, now seems to be out of print, though second-hand copies are not too unreasonable. The zeppelin above, representing “lo Stato di Mangiare,” is called il Cetriolo (“the Cucumber”). Evans also designed zeppelin issues for the nation of Achterdijk (“Behind the dike” — where he lived in Holland). Some of the latter are depicted from perspectives that no artist designing real stamps would ever have been permitted: the airships are caught as they drift out of the frame, as if the viewer were looking not at a flat printed stamp but out through a window at something moving beyond, or perhaps at a photograph taken a moment too late. It's a kind of understated little visual joke that shows that Evans was comfortable enough with the conventions of the old stamp designs to know how to break the rules when it suited him. Bruce Chatwin, in his review of The World of Donald Evans, writes of the artist: “He had no literary gifts himself. Sometimes he thought of writing — or of getting someone else to write — an accompanying text; but in the end he preferred to leave each stamp as a window into his world, and the rest to the imagination.” Eisenhart's version, which I suspect is what Chatwin is paraphrasing, is a little different; he says that Evans “hesitated to write down the stories of his countries in detail because he wanted his work to be open-ended. He wanted to leave room for the fantasies of his audience and for the expansion of his countries in his own imagination as he worked.” Evans was, in fact, always quite clear in his own mind about what the stories of those countries were, and he was perfectly happy to share those stories with other people. On the page, though, the paintings stand alone. In the end, I think Evans was wise to let the stamps speak for themselves. They don't really open worlds, but instead enclose them entirely. Part of their sweetness, their joy, lies in their utter self-sufficiency. Wrinkles: It was Werner Herzog's The White Diamond that got me thinking about airships of various kinds. I remembered that Evans had painted some zeppelins, and refreshing my memory about Evans brought me back to Bruce Chatwin's review of The World of Donald Evans, which can be found in his posthumous collection What Am I Doing Here. Among the other pieces in the book is one I had completely forgotten about, called “Werner Herzog in Ghana.” It dates from 1988, when Chatwin was dying from AIDS. Among the mourners at his funeral a few months later was Salman Rushdie, with whom Chatwin had traveled in Australia while researching what would become The Songlines. The funeral would be Rushdie's last public appearance for some time, as the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa calling for his murder had been announced a few hours earlier. “Werner Herzog in Ghana” describes a visit to the location of the filming of Cobra Verde, an adaptation of Chatwin's The Viceroy of Ouidah. Chatwin and the director had first met several years earlier — also in Australia, as it happens. At that time, Herzog had asked Chatwin about working on a screenplay; Chatwin wasn't interested, but did give him a copy of The Viceroy of Ouidah, which Herzog liked and, later, decided to film. It was a natural match of director and author since, Chatwin says, he had in fact originally written the book under the influence of Herzog's earlier films. Whether the end result was successful I can't say, not having seen Cobra Verde. More wrinkles: Chatwin wrote that he was delighted to discover that one of his own photographs, the image of a tomb-tower in Afghanistan, had been used by Donald Evans as the basis of one of his stamp designs. December 15, 2005
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