THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

It was vicarious travelling 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.

Donald Evans in Anon/Stamps, 1975

As a boy, too, he had dreamed of the South Seas.  Now he dreamed up a coral archipelago – Amis et Amants – a “French” colony populated by happy, friendly, amorous blacks: the stamps of one issue, titled Coups de Foudre, show a row of storm-blased coconut palms, each painted in a different colour combination to suggest the different thunderbolts of love.  Or there were the Tropides – tiny islands in Vermeer-like dots and dashes.

Chatwin/Doing, 1998