In this monologue, painter Michael Deas explains his practical and artistic approach to creating postage stamps. He paints on canvases larger than the final stamp (typically 4×6 or 6×9 inches) and constantly checks how the image will appear when reduced by holding a mirror to view the composition at stamp size. He describes his most cherished work—a Tennessee Williams stamp—detailing how he incorporated a subtle, hidden figure of Blanche DuBois on a streetcar background, a palette of deep greens and blues with an orange glow inspired by Whistler’s nocturnes, and the importance of fine, almost invisible details. Deas emphasizes that a successful stamp balances color, intricate detail, and strong design to become an enduring visual icon.
Chapters
One thing that I do when I'm painting a stamp is I have to constantly be aware of how it's going to look at stamp size. I generally will paint at roughly 4 by 6 inches or 6 by 9 inches, I think, is the largest stamp I've ever done. But you have to constantly imagine what it's going to look like when it's reduced. So towards that end, I keep a mirror by my side at all times when I'm painting, and I'm constantly holding the mirror up over my shoulder and looking at the stamp to see how it will look when it shrinks down. I don't know what it looks like to my neighbors who see me in the middle of the night with a mirror looking at myself, or so it must seem, but it helps you see what the image will look like when it's condensed down to stamp size. The stamp that I'm most proud of, I think, is one of the first stamps I did was of Tennessee Williams. When I painted it, I was living a couple of doors away from where Tennessee Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie, so I felt he was watching over my shoulder a little bit, perhaps. I've always been a big admirer of Williams, in particular of his play A Streetcar Named Desire. So I depicted a portrait of him, but in the background I depicted a streetcar. If you've ever been to New Orleans and you see the streetcars at night, they give off a beautiful glow. So I spent several hours in a rather risky part of New Orleans photographing the end of the streetcar line. And if you look at it under a magnifying loupe, it's not visible to the naked eye, you'll see a single solitary figure sitting on the streetcar. And that's meant to represent Blanche DuBois, the heroine of Streetcar Named Desire. And that's one of the things I like to do in my stamps is to put a lot of very subtle detail in there to kind of lure the viewer into looking at it more closely. For the Tennessee Williams stamp, I purposely chose a palette of deep greens and blues with a little bit of an orange glow. I have to say I was inspired a little bit by the painter Whistler. Who did a lot of nocturnes, night scenes, that use those same kind of luminous blues and deep greens. Color is very crucial to the stamp, but I also feel that the detail is what draws people in and makes them linger over a stamp. So it's a combination of those elements, both color and detail and design. A good stamp is an icon that will stick in people's memories for years to come, if it's done well.
