This moody little landscape collage has a very different story to the glorious technicolour whimsy of the collage in my last post...
The starting point was again 2 stamps which had appeared at random during a sorting session, yet blended beautifully together. The overall colours of this finished piece reminds me of a highland landscape – heather & moss, a deepening lavender-slate sky… I was in fact paying so much attention to the colour blending during the composition stage that I genuinely failed to notice the unfortunate alignment of a little row of riflemen lining up to take shots at the centre left critter (mongoose?) until I had begun gluing everything down:
It’s still pretty, though, isn’t it…? :S
Let me distract you from the above scene for a moment. The ‘critter’ stamp is from the Republic of Maluku Selatan, which I had never heard of. A little bit of research (okay, Googling) later, I discovered that it is a region of Indonesia which fought for independence but never officially issued its own postage stamps. The designs such as the one in my collage above were a private issue from the 1950s but were sadly never actually used postally. Technically, they appear to count as ‘bogus’ stamps to collectors, worth little to nothing (I found a heated discussion about the series on a philately forum).
All that aside, this series of stamps clearly has a fascinating story, and to me that warrants a legitimate place within at least the fringes of postal history. And even that aside, this collage would not exist without the existence of a stamp from a non-existent country, so it’s good enough for me! ;)