Síocháin, Peace. Stamp it.
2023 is proving to be a fast moving year and yet, honestly, May seems longer than three months ago. Weird. As ever, I am late to share the latest commission undertaken for An Post, the Irish post office body. I say ‘latest’ as if there were many commissions but the previous commission (see the previous blog post), which was the first, involved 4 stamps so I feel I now have a few postal stamp designs under my (not-so-little) belt. Anyway, in May this year my latest commission (ok, my second commission) was published.
And this stamp was (I am SUPER proud to say) the Irish entry for that “Eurovision” for stamps, the EUROPA edition. I know, I know, you didn’t know this existed, well I didn’t know, I mean I knew - I did see EUROPA stamps - but I didn’t really KNOW. For example, I didn’t know there was a competition involved. So now I know. As you do too. I also know I didn’t win, the Luxembourg entry won and I like it. Its design was inspired by the Celtic love knot symbol of two interweaving hearts and the colour palette was selected to illustrate all the nations in the world. Congratulations to Post Luxembourg and the designers, Linda Bos and Runa Egilsdottir of A Designer’s Collective , but, enough of them. They won, they’re happy enough.
The theme for this year was “Peace – the highest value of humanity”. This theme was a request of Ukraine’s post office to demonstrate solidarity with Ukraine during a time of war. There were entries from 24 european countries’ post office organisations (not Royal Mail, as it doesn’t seem to be a member of PostEurop the pan-european body ). The winning stamp was issued by 52 postal regions and some, like Ireland chose to issue both the winning entry and their own individual national entry (my design!).
My design is the N (national) stamp value and carries the dual language (Gaeilge / English) title ‘Síocháin / Peace’. The international stamp (W) is the Post Luxembourg winner. Again I had the pleasure of designing a First Day Cover envelope and postal mark for it. Another dream stamp project.
