STAMPITILLISM

I was six years old. I grew up in the Soviet Union, where almost every child collected postage stamps. I had several albums of my own and spent countless hours looking through them, fascinated by rare animals, unusual plants, images of outer space, famous people and faraway countries.

Back then, we still wrote real letters. I used to exchange letters with my cousin, who lived in another city, and I can still remember her address and postcode. We would send letters to each other and eagerly wait for a reply. It was such an ordinary part of our lives, and yet, looking back, something quite extraordinary.

Then things changed. Letters gradually disappeared from our everyday lives, and so did the stamps.

Many years later, during the pandemic, I found myself drawn to them again. At a market, I came across some old stamp albums containing Soviet stamps issued in 1961. As I looked through them, I thought about the fact that these stamps were almost sixty years old. This little piece of paper had survived all those decades, travelled to a completely different country and somehow ended up in my hands.

I began thinking about the people who had once bought these stamps, stuck them onto envelopes and sent letters. After all, behind every stamp there were at least two people. One person wrote the letter, choosing their words, perhaps spending a long time trying to express what they wanted to say. Another received the envelope, opened it, read the letter and felt something. It might have been ordinary family news, a birthday greeting, a declaration of love or a message someone had been desperately waiting for.

Some of the stamps still bear postmarks, sometimes showing a date or the name of a town, sometimes just a few letters or numbers.

I know nothing about these people, and I will probably never know what was written in their letters. But I find the very existence of these tiny paper witnesses to other people's lives extraordinary. Someone held them in their hands many decades ago, never imagining that one day they would end up in my studio in London.

Gradually, I began to think about working with them. I was drawn to their colours, the remarkable variety of shades and the possibility of creating an entirely new image from hundreds of old stamps. From the beginning, it was important to me to keep every stamp intact, preserving its individual characteristics and traces of its past.

That was how I began working with postage stamps, and how Stampitillism gradually came into being.

At the heart of Stampitillism is a simple principle: one postage stamp becomes one pixel of an image.

I work with genuine postage stamps, selecting them by colour and arranging them on canvas in a strict grid. Each stamp occupies its own position, precisely aligned with its neighbours, without shifting or overlapping. Gradually, these small elements of colour form a composition. It might be a face, an object, a word or an abstract arrangement of colours.

Most of my time is spent working with colour. I sort stamps by shade, compare them and search for the right combinations. Two stamps that appear identical can look quite different beside each other. One is warmer, another cooler; the ink may have faded, or a postmark may have altered the original colour.

I can spend hours searching for a particular shade or rearranging stamps until a combination feels right. Sometimes I examine hundreds for one small area. And sometimes the colour I need simply does not exist among the stamps I have, so I have to rethink my idea.

I never cut the stamps. I preserve their borders, perforated edges, printed images and postmarks. Even when a stamp becomes part of a larger field of colour, it remains recognisable and can be examined on its own.

The size and shape of a stamp determine how much detail I can achieve. I have to simplify lines, leave out elements and sometimes reconsider a composition.

There are similarities between Stampitillism and mosaic, pointillism and collage. What makes my approach distinctive is the material itself: genuine postage stamps, kept whole, each bringing its own history.

I love observing how the perception of a finished work changes depending on the viewing distance. From afar, the eye brings the colours together and an image emerges. But as someone moves closer, they begin to distinguish individual stamps, noticing portraits, numbers, inscriptions, dates and traces of postal cancellations. You can come right up to a painting and spend time looking at a single stamp, wondering where it came from and what journey it might have made.

When a work is finished and every stamp has found its place on the canvas, I want to add one more mark to their history, something connected to the painting itself and the moment of its creation.

That was how the idea of my final artist’s postmark, Postmarked by Vero, came about.

I like to imagine that hundreds of stamps, once attached to different letters and travelling along entirely different routes, have now come together in a single work of art. Decades may separate their original postmarks from this moment. In between, they have passed from hand to hand, through albums, boxes and collections, until they found their way to my studio.

The final artist’s postmark records the moment when those separate journeys meet. The stamps become part of a work with a history of its own.

Sometimes I think about how much of an object’s life happens beyond the purpose it was made for. The letters have often disappeared, yet these small pieces of paper are still here.

And I like to think that, many years from now, someone might look at my work as closely as I once looked at those old stamps from 1961, amazed by how much time and how many human stories can be held within such a small piece of paper.