About European Stars
(A Franked, Late-Post Impression of David Hockney!)European Stars is a tribute to David Hockney’s exceptional talent and wide range of projects that he has worked on. It is probably less well known that in 1992, he designed the stamp (European Star) to commemorate The Single European Market, which is depicted in the top left hand side of the impression.
The impression is a collage of modern used British postage stamps and is poster size (1.22m x 1.625m) with over 4,000 stamps being used in the work.
The stamps have been specially chosen, not only for colour but also for their intrinsic reaction to UV light, philatelists will be well aware of the phosphor band reactions to long wave UV, blue, yellow etc. as well as the visual effect of the optical brightener (OBA) present in the paper. All this has been taken into account to produce an impression, which is infinitely changeable depending on the incident lighting conditions.
To illustrate the range of optical effects the collage was photographed under the following conditions for the European Stars slideshow sequence:
UV light + tungsten light (100% full power)
UV light + tungsten light (75% full power)
UV light + tungsten light (40% full power)
UV light only