Stamps to Admire or Stomp On

A couple of months ago, I posted a sampling of my stamp collection. I suspect that's what prompted me to order this Abstract Expressionists commemorative sheet from the United States Postal Service.

Although my stamp collecting hobby has been dormant for many years, now I've gone and purchased an item which threatens to be the beginning of a resurgence of my old passion.

I ordered two of these sheets, one of which I'll keep for my collection. I've decided to peel the stamps from the second sheet and adorn special birthday cards with a smattering of abstract art with the intention of dazzling the recipients. Perhaps I'll appear to be a connoisseur of fine art to those select few. (I'm not, but please don't tell!)

If you grow weary of viewing these abstract expressionists stamps and reading the hogwash about the art, scroll to the bottom for my humble and uninformed opinion of abstract art. I mean no harm by expressing myself in this outspoken manner, but these are my present thoughts.

The wording beside each stamp below is not mine. I took these descriptions from the back side of this sheet of stamps.

Hans Hofmann's The Golden Wall (1961) features his trademark "push and pull" technique: geometic shapes that animate the canvas by seeming to shift and overlap.

Skittering black lines, shifting shapes, fragmented body parts, and flashes of color fill the surface of Willem de Kooning's 1948 work Asheville.

Orange and Yellow (1956) features two rectangles painted in the vibrant tones that Mark Rothko favored.

For Convergence (1952), Jackson Pollock laid blue and white clouds and loops of red and yellow atop a black-and-white base.

The Liver Is the Cock's Comb (1944), Arshile Gorky's creation, uses abstract forms to camouflage a deeply personal portrait of his family at home.

Clyfford Still painted ponderous, abstract canvases to convey universal themes about the human condition. 1948-C is one of his creations.

Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 34 features black bars and ovals and vertical white stripes that partly obscure colors that refer to the flag of the Spanish Republic.

Joan Mitchell's La Grande Vallee O (1983) is intended by the artist "to convey the feeling of the dying sunflower."

Romanesque Facade (1949) brings together Adolph Gottlieb's aspiration to be intuitively understandable to everyone and to convey a universal emotional reality.




Achilles (1952) by Barnett Newman features a swath of red paint that moves down the canvas to end in a ragged edge.

As for me, I'm not impressed with abstract art. Most of these "works of art" look to me like what you'd see on the walls of a kindergarten classroom after the children played with paint.

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What do you think?