DENMARK – Cover from Horsens, Denmark to Braga, Portugal

Cover with stamp from the issue Stamp Art - Jesper Christiansen posted on October, 6 2015.

(A very special thanks to my friend Hans Jørgen Laursen)

Stamp Art - Jesper Christiansen

Amosvej 8, 2300 København S, Danmark – an address on Amager in Copenhagen – is the title of the work which the painter and graphic artist Jesper Christiansen (b. 1955) has created for the Stamp Art series. The artist lived at this address when he painted the work, and the image shows the view from his own studio.

Jesper Christiansen graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where he also taught as a professor from 2003

to 2008. In public he is particularly well known from an art quiz on DR2, where in recent years he has appeared as a popular presenter of art. In addition to receiving the Eckersberg Medal from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Jesper Christiansen has also been awarded the Danish Arts Foundation’s lifelong artist grant.

THE EMPTY ROOM

“I always wanted my work to look like a stamp,” says Jesper Christiansen. The first research was done on the internet, where he read that a stamp is distinguished by its denomination, national designation and the glue on the reverse. Therefore, these three elements feature prominently on the stamp – highlighted in fact by short captions to make it absolutely clear that this is a stamp. Jesper Christiansen went for an ornamental red frame around the picture to make the white perforations stand out more distinctly and thus reinforce the stamp look.

The image shows a work table with the items which actually lay there on the day

Jesper Christiansen painted the scene. The space is thus full of objects, but empty of people. “The empty space gives viewers a chance to project themselves into the work,” explains Jesper Christiansen, who has a certain fondness for painting empty spaces with an illusion of depth and perspective.

There is a view through the window of a yellow house, which on closer inspection has the same windows and rice paper lamps as the room you are in. With a twist of humour, Jesper Christiansen has created a duplicity in the painting, as if he is looking at himself in another house.

FROM SMALL TO BIG

From working on a small-scale stamp design, Jesper Christiansen has leaped into quite a different dimension. At the time of writing, he is putting the finishing touches to seven large paintings of the Paradiso described by Dante in his Divine Comedy. “Many artists have interpreted the Inferno and the Purgatorio as depicted in Dante’s work, but I wanted to paint Paradiso,” says the 60-year-old artist, who has so far created several ceiling-high, four-metre-wide paintings with images from Paradiso in his studio in Odsherred in north-western Zealand. The works can be seen at Galerie Mikael Andersen in central Copenhagen from 22 May as part of a solo exhibition.

Technical Details

Stamp Art - Jesper Christiansen

Date of Issue: June 13, 2015
Values: set with one stamp of DKK 10.00

Designer: Ella Clausen

Illustrator: Jesper Christiansen/Bertil Skov Jorgensen

Printer:
Process: Offset/Intaglio

Size: stamp - 51mm x 43mm

Perforation:

Sheet composition:

Paper:

Watermark: