Derry Noyes designed U.S. stamps featuring Alexander Calder's work, a project that connected to his childhood playing under a Calder stabile his father commissioned. The main challenge was shrinking Calder's mobiles to stamp size without losing the delicate wires, so the team reinforced them in the designs. Noyes chose a small maquette with Calder's signature red and yellow colors to capture his sense of fun.
Over the years, I've been given many different assignments with the Postal Service, and we've all had our dogs, believe me. Certified Public Accountants was a hard one. The social causes are perhaps the toughest, but once in a while something comes your way that you just pounce on, and for me, that was the Calder stamps. I had known him as a child growing up, and my father had commissioned him to design a stabile, his very first stabile for our courtyard in the house I grew up. I was a pretty little kid when all this was happening, but I grew up watching the stabile being put together and put into our courtyard, and then playing underneath this piece of modern art my entire life. I used it as a fort, I put my turtles on it to bake in the sun, sometimes overbaked. So here Last year I had this great opportunity to represent Calder on postage stamps, and it turned out that it was far more complicated than I thought it would be. The hardest pieces to bring down to stamp size were the mobiles, and I wanted to get those mobiles onto stamps. The problem with a mobile is that when you shrink it down to stamp size, all the little wires that connect these shapes together completely fall apart. So we beefed up those tiny little wires once they were small and made it really read the way it would have had it been large. The other issue was scale. There was a real scale difference. He has huge stabiles in the middle of cities, and he has tiny, tiny little maquettes. Put a huge stabile and shrink that down to stamp size and put that next to a mobile, and it looks like a toy. You had to be very aware of the scale of each of the stamps when they're next to each other. The image that worked the best at stamp size was the little maquette, the one that was almost stamp size in reality, and it had the key colors of Calder. It had the red, it had the yellow, did not have the blue, but it had the right spirit. That's what I was after, just bringing across that joie de vivre, that wonderful sense of Fun that he had.
