Mail Art News #37: Rubber Stamps + Mail Art = Yes

outgoing mail, T. Brown, 2021

🌎🌍🌏 Where to find rubber stamps in the wild?

If you don't have the patience or skill to carve your own stamps, then you must hand over your hard earned money, in exchange for either new or used ones. In addition to the occasional find at a thrift store, you can also check the internet. On etsy, I will recommend rebburrubber, 100 Proof Press, York's Little Art Studio, Invoke Arts, and Jumping Wolf Art Studio. And there are many other shops on there selling stamps, so I am sure that I've left some out. If you're looking for lots of used rubber stamps, ebay is the best place to look. Simply search for "lot rubber stamps" and many results will appear. It's up to you to see if the results fit with your style. When buying used, check for any defects, such as melting, hardening, and cracking. Send an email to mailartnews@gmail.com if you have any other online rubber stamp resources.

Or maybe you're lucky enough to live near a Scrap. Or maybe you live in New York near Casey Rubber Stamps, or in Las Vegas near Viva Las Vegas Rubber Stamps. For non-US readers, are there any amazing rubber stamp shops near you? 

⁠— A moment of silence for all of the rubber stamp companies no longer in business. You may notice on a few of your used stamps, the name of a company, but when you try to look them up on the internet, no, they are no longer around. I thank them now for making the world a more creative place.

Rubber Stamps and Mail Art

Thomas Brown: I remember seeing the office stamps when my mother would take me to where she worked, and one day in the early 1990s, a relative brought home some rubber stamps, including a set of Star Trek Next Generation stamps. 

1993 Star Trek Next Generation Stamps

While the office and art stamps did catch my attention at the time, they were only a mere blip on my radar. I knew they were out there, but did not gravitate toward them until around 2010 when I made a huge impulse buy of a Zing laser engraving machine to throw myself into something and impress my online art friends in the process. My mail art activities began around this time, as well. I took out a loan for the machine and the necessary HEPA filtration system. By now, I have mixed feelings about the laser engraving of rubber stamps. Sure, I made hundreds of stamps using the laser engraver, and it was great fun, but the idea of burning the rubbery material with a laser always kind of bothered me. The process makes a great deal of dust and some gasses which is why the HEPA filter was required. Anyway, I sold the thing after several years due to financial considerations. 

If I have to guess, I will say that I have over one thousand rubber stamps with roughly half being laser engraved, half being the traditional red rubber stamps, and some small portion being made of the clear photopolymer. I would love to get a vulcanizing machine one day. 

I love rubber stamps so much because they can produce basically the same image over and over again AND can be combined to create collage-like scenes. These scenes can be deeply profound and full of meaning OR they can be playful, experimental, nonsense, just for fun. What's not to love about them?

My favorite mail art to send / receive is mostly rubber-centric, although I do include hand drawn images and the rare paper collage. Here are two recent images that I made and will be mailing them out soon. 

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Now let's see what the other mail artists have to say, based on my request for responses on FB and IUOMA. Here they are in no particular order and mostly un-edited. Not-so-fun fact: There are no rubber stamp Unicode characters or emojis. The questions are listed below for reference: 

Do you have any of the following?

• rubber stamp madness (not the magazine)
• rubber stamp addiction
• a love for rubber stamps?

Do you use your rubber stamps in your mail art? If so, Mail Art News wants to hear from you. Please send me a paragraph or two or ten, answering the following questions:

• How did you get into rubber stamping?
• How many stamps do you have in your collection? 
• Why do you like rubber stamps so much?
• How do you use them in your mail art?

Maxima Strange

My interest began with a book I found at a library sale. It’s THE RUBBER STAMP ALBUM by Joni K. Miller and Lowry Thompson. To me it’s still the best book about rubber stamps around, although the resources section is out of date because so many of the companies have gone out of business. What I love about the book is the surrealistic approach it takes to combining stamps. 

I am in the process of counting them now, and have so far counted over 400. I’m sure I must have well over 500. 

I enjoy using them for collage and decorating letters and envelopes. I like the repetition of images in a composition and the fact that each stamped image is slightly different. It’s always a surprise how a stamping will turn out. I like combining unlike things (Without contraries there is no progression, said William Blake) and subverting the original “meaning” of an image. They also help me to discover my personal mythology, as I find myself selecting certain stamps more than others.

 

[I use them] On almost everything I send out. Below is a card I sent to William Mellott’s Assembling Zine, “The Rubber Postcard.” 

Joey Patrickt  

I use rubber stamps on my mail art envelopes - usually on the backside, the front is a graphic for ROBOT MAILART COW, address and postage. I also got my portrait rubber stamp from Adam Roussopoulos and have been using it frequently. 

Really like what you're doing with your publication, Mail Art News. Thanks.

Lulu Flanagan  

I’m rather new at IUOMA, but I have rubber stamps that I do use on my envelopes. I’m looking to get some more and am excited to see what I might discover with the talented fellow who is sharing his portrait rubber stamps with active IUOMA members! Wow! 

Pam Chatfield

It all started when I was a teenager and ordered a Barbara Streisand stamp from the back of a magazine.  I stamped that thing on everything.  I loved it!  After that I bought office supply type stamps and decorated envelopes and stuff with them.  Many years later when it became an actual craft and lots of different designs became available I thought I died and went to heaven.  But it all started with that one Streisand stamp.

I have a lot, but not near as many as I used to have.  At one time I had hundreds, but they were a casualty of a breakup and cross country move.  However, I am enjoying the process of restarting my collection.  It's like a treasure hunt!

They have a different look to them than drawing.  To me it's almost an industrial look, for lack of a better term.  I like the look.

I use them with my drawings to make scenes.  I have some large stamps, but I mostly like the small ones so I can use them in my pictures.  I do whatever feels right at the time.  Sometimes I use just stamps and other times I use them together with my own drawing.  It's usually a mix though.  For color I use mostly watercolors and sometimes gel pens.  I just started using watercolor pencils and I'm really liking them.  They're great for getting into the small areas of some of the stamps.

Aside from everything I said above, they're just plain fun to use.  

Carien van Hest  

I recently tried to cut stamps myself out of erasers. Here are two results:

Mim Golub Scalin 

Oh My what questions?!

I do have and have had rubber stamps madness for some time.

Can’t say when it started. I probably had home made ones in

Elementary school, potato prints, vegetable prints, and I’m sure we

Did them in High school to make over-all patterns and

As I think back (and I’m old so I'm thinking pretty far back) I think

We made them or used found things as stamps in Univ. art school.

I re-discovered some stamps that were so old they had deteriorated!

yikes.

I was fortunate to be able to visit Vincent Sardon’s shop

Tampographe Sardon, when we stayed in Paris, and got a bunch

Of his stamps, including patterned ones. So yummy, always wish

I'd gotten more. And I have my treasure Ken Brown stamps and

Edward Gorey ones, too.

I d0 use rubber stamps in my Mail Art at times.  And more recently, I’m using

Them in the postcards that I send out to encourage voters to vote.

In fact, that has become my number 1 use of them in recent times.

I have lots of stamps and they aren’t organized. I wish they were.

The best thing I did during the pandemic was to get some lucite

Drawers to keep some of them in . I have lots in my studio and some

A kitchen drawer And they’re in plastic bins & little tins. I have them in my TV room so I can use when I write

My postcards while watch TV at night.

I have lots of different alphabets and numbers that I’ve collected over the years.

Tiny sets and larger sets and a set or two from other countries with

Accented letters.

And I have a lot of personal ones that I’ve had made at a local place.

Why do I like them? They’re fun, And I like pairing them to make combinations

That amuse me.

 Oh and Adam Roussopoulos gifted me with a bunch of word bubbles.

Endless fun.

And I still have The Rubber Stamp Album from 1978!!

Here’s a few images, I have so many more, but I won’t inundate you.

Feel free to use any If you include my ramblings.

Or not.

Fun to “chat” with you about this.

Mim

IUOMA

@mimgolub on instagram

(Richmond, VA)

PS don’t know why the voter one is so big. Oh well.

 

Here are a few of the ones that I had made. The circles. I put the date and my signature in them. And my name in Japanese.

.This is a recent piece I sent to

Brazil but it got returned to me. Anna said to resend so I did in an envelope. Hope it got to her this time.

http://mim4art.blogspot.com

Nonlocal Variable

Dear Editor, here is the information you requested:

How did you get into rubber stamping? Dr. John Held, Jr. showed me how. So far, there have been no accidents from my Xacto knives. Yet I still have angst about that cow.

How many stamps do you have in your collection? Not counting my 1990's collection, which was donated to a Fluxus archivist in NYC: 42 since returning to the Eternal Network in February 2023. This is a production yield of 0.385321101 new rubber stamps per day. Concerning.

Why do you like rubber stamps so much? This is a paradox. Why two docs I don't know. Is this a Zen koan? Are you trying to trick me? Probably because rubber is not a fossil fuel.

How do you use them in your mail art? I press them onto ink stamp pads and then press them down on a substrate, usually paper. Sometimes, also on my ears and eyelids. Everything is connected. And why do you ask so many questions?

Include between one and four photos of your rubber stamped mail art / your collection (suggested)... Make up your mind. Between one and four could be two or three. Wait, that's also 23, the magic number in the Kabbala and Illuminati. Is this a coded message?

Thank you for all you do to, er, for the Eternal Network.

Rebekka Schmidt 

I asked myself: "what is this stamping-thing? why do so many people do something with stamps on IUOMA?"...but at the same time when I was new to IUOMA (march2023) Kiki joined here. And she "promoted" the self-carved-stamp thing. I thought they were cute and thought it`s interesting that a lot of people here have 'their thing' which is special about their art.

At some point I wanted to make stickers or a stamp with a drawing I made. Thought stamp would be cheaper than stickers on the long run. In the printing shop they wanted to have 33€ for a stamp. Inspired by Kiki I thought "I can make my own stamp - or at least I will try". Other aspect was that I wanted to have something handmade instead of a machine made stamp. (Even if the drawing is made by me).

So I tried linocut and thought linoprint would be cool. But it felt kind of dead...don't know why but after 6 prints I got bored.

For testing I ordered a flexi vinyl block for rubber stamps. I'm still at the starting point of the process and like the flexi material for carving. AND stamping with a stamping pad is so comfortable :) Only made some small text stamps yet but ordered 7 more vinyl blocks because  I WANT TO MAKE MORE stamps! :)    like the carving itself and the stamping. and that I can reproduce a drawing I made as often as I want. and I like the solid black areas.

I'm starting to stamp on some of the envelopes and on ATC's. Also plan to add them to original tiny zines.  

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