Stamp Kaleidoscope

During the opening ceremony of my latest exhibition in the Hatszin Teatrum my friend Tibor Mandi told me that the Aron Gabor Stamp Collectors’ Group lead by him would organize a stamp exhibition in autumn with the title “Stamp Kaleidoscope”. He asked me whether I would make a picture of this topic. I answered at once of course with a strong “yes” although I guessed it would be a hard task. Days, weeks passed by and I still did not know how to start this picture. And suddenly the unexpected solution arrived! We had some interesting programs with my husband in London but I missed my stamps in the evenings.  We decided to look for stamps, went for shopping. It was not an easy task but finally we found some packs of used stamps in a charity shop. It was a very mixed package, there were no two similar pieces in it. I started thus sort them according to their colours.

Looking at the blue, green, red, yellow, lilac piles of stamps my idea came, I knew how I would create my own kaleidoscope out of those piles. It was already at home when I ordered the stamps into concentric circles separating each from the next with stripes made of names of different countries. It was really a tiresome work, I used my scissors almost all the time. Having glued the last colour the picture looked like as if it was a big circle shaped stamp. One thing was still missing, the characteristic stamp edge, the perforation itself. And then it came to my mind that some time earlier I had received a zigzag type piece of scissors from Ica Bodnar, a colleague of mine. I got it and cut each pieces to be glued to the edge of the picture. This was the way how I made this orgy of colours and cavalcade of countries.