Leonardo On-Line: WOW: Artistamps


Leonardo On-Line: Words on Works








Artistamps

 
 
 Patricia Tavenner

 
 


Since 1970, I have created 70 sheets of "Artistamps." There is great variety among them. Each sheet has its own aura and reality.

Artistamps are single stamps or sheets of stamps made by artists for artistic and expressive purposes that are used on envelopes and packages. Artistamps came to prominence with the advent of Mail Art in the late 1960s. Briefly, Mail Art is anything that artists and other creative souls send though the mail or, at times, by fax, email or "pony express" (someone actually brings it). Some people specialize in envelopes; others, audio- or videotapes, or 'zines or stamps. It is hard to do everything today as mail artists did when it all began. There are just too many people doing it now.

Artistamps are included along with regular postage on all of the wonderful things that travel the mail routes. There are lots of exhibitions of artistamps. We trade them as though they were baseball cards; we nurture our friendships through the mail and, occasionally, in person. Mail Art is one of the precursors to e-mail art.

A philatelic I am not; a single stamp is not very meaningful to me or interesting by itself. I think in terms of an entire 8 1/2-x-11 sheet of stamps and of how one stamp is part of the whole. There is great power in something small that is repeated.

I work in series of more than one image or page or drawing or print. The Sea Shells series is an example: so far seven pages comprise the series. I wanted to do something that made people feel good because I feel we are bombarded with negative media. So I set about to heal this in some way with my art. I wanted a fairly universal symbol -- an archetype -- so I chose a shell, a recurring image in my artwork. I believe that most of us have positive memories about shells. I had done a series of lush color pastel drawings of shells; lush color is an important consideration in my choice of imagery for Artistamps.

The original works are color pastel drawings on rag paper. First, I had color photo prints made from slides of the drawings. I arranged these photos on a sheet of paper and took them to a special copy center where the operators are sympathetic to artists. I prefer to use a Canon Color laser copier for Artistamps. I like to make special arrangements of the images on paper so that some are slightly askew as a reminder that these stamps have a non- machine hand in their creation.

Back in the studio, I rubber-stamped my name and post office--like symbols on the edges of the stamps to make them look official. The rubber-stamp images I used included a circle stamp of my name in Japanese, a small line drawing of a shell, a stamp that says "canceled" with the official lines of a cancellation stamp and another with the words "Oakland" and "Eternal City." Finally, these sheets of stamps were perforated -- making them look like official postage stamps.

Many of my stamps are black and white as these are cheaper to produce. I am currently working on a black-and-white series called illusions #2. For illusions #2, I began with a rubber stamp I had made from a drawing that was inspired by ballroom dancing. I selected a shoe stamp and combined it with the circle stamp that has my name on it in Japanese and a flower. I placed each on a black square to make a contained image. Around this I drew a stamp outline so that it would appear perforated and put a black outline around the whole collaged image. To create the background, I took a sheet that was perforated and that had three or four stamp images on it. I put black paper behind it and photocopied it on a Kodak 1575 copy machine. I moved the sheet as the copy lights passed over it to purposely distort it, because I wanted free-form lines and shadows as I moved the paper. The Kodak 1575 machine will give gradations of tone as it has a screen on it.

The final print combines the two layers. The black tone from the machine is similar to an etching black in that it is rich and dense. No other copy machine gives this quality of black.

In my 25-year sojourn as the "Mail Queen" of Mail Art, as a maker of Artistamps, I have looked all over for ideas and people to communicate with. The main objective of my mail art is to have fun and receive pleasure from my creativity.


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