Michael Goaman was an innovative stamp designer who worked in partnership with his wife Sylvia (1924-2006), the daughter of the author and playwright J. B. Priestley. His designs include stamps for more than 40 countries, mainly Britain and the British Commonwealth.
His designs had striking clarity and were crafted with an eye for the integral message. David Scott, the author of European Stamp Design (1995), regards the designs that Goaman and his wife produced from 1950-80 as being “among the most beautiful and original of that period in the world”. Scott highlights the “exeplary flair and finesse” in bringing exquisite design and visual coherence to stamp design.
Goaman carried out extensive research for the subjects depicted, travelling to Nigeria, the Gulf and the Pacific Islands, where he worked for two periods of several months during the 1970s. His illustrations combine a stylised clarity with an accurate attention to detail for subjects as wideranging as flora and fauna, local customs and costumes, and modern images such as Concorde.
Advertisement
His use of bold colours, which drew on Sylvia’s expertise in textile design, and his skills in illustration lent themselves well to the photographic methods of reproduction which came into use for stamps in the 1960s. The intense colours of the landscape, sea and sky of Caribbean islands are expressed in the 1970 stamps for St Lucia, where the changing sky of day and night is captured in shades of yellow and green for sunrise and mauve and gold for sunset, with the silhouettes of palms reflected in a shining sea, and an azure sea meets lush green land in full sun.
Likewise, the spectrum of intense colours for the 1965 St Vincent set evokes the poetic appeal of the exotic. The set also demonstrates Goaman’s skill in illustrating a wide range of subjects, including traditional customs such as boat-building, landscapes, artefacts, flowering plants, fruits, a parrot, buildings, harbour and crater. He also captured the chill of the Antarctic in the cooler, darker colours used for the British Antarctic Territory set, 1963, and his skill in working with shape and mass is shown in the way that the three-dimensional typeface frames each stamp, one of which features a skier turning to skim over the top of the lettering.
Advertisement
Goaman’s expertise as an artist is well illustrated in the 1969 design for Concorde, depicted soaring over Britain and France in a deep blue sky, and in the image of Gypsy Moth IV, 1967, shown against foaming waves, echoed in the texture of the clouds.
Scott notes Goaman’s ability “to concentrate a sometimes quite complicated message into a compelling visual motif”. His 1961 design for the Post Office Savings Bank shows a stylised tree: the squirrel symbolises the saving of nuts for the winter, and the owl perched above conveys the wisdom of saving. In a 1963 design for Mauritius the interlaced grain, fruit, fish and domestic animals express the message that it commemorates: Freedom from Hunger.
Goaman worked with colour roughs and, for the final artwork, large paintings, using overlays to incorporate other elements such as typography and the Queen’s head, which were always used to enhance the overall design, framing and adding to the composition rather than being added or squeezed in as an afterthought. He worked in original and creative ways with the Queen’s head, using portraits and semi-relief profile images to produce an object of beauty integral to the design.
Advertisement
By 1969 Goaman was producing stamp designs for the British Commonwealth rather than for Britain. According to Sir David Elliott, a one-time member of the Stamp Advisory Committee, Goaman’s stamp designs of the 1950s and 1960s had great appeal to the layman, who could recognise their beauty, grace and impact.
Goaman, however, felt that his work was neglected and sidelined as a result of changes in the Post Office during the late 1960s. By 1969 the Post Office was becoming more commercial, producing commemorative stamps as much for the philatelic market as for their inherent design qualities.
Advertisement
The marginalisation of Goaman’s work for British stamps could be seen as the result of changing fashions in the visual arts. The designs chosen increasingly took a more populist direction towards pictorial images. The trend continues today with stamps featuring images drawn from media and popular culture, for example, pop stars, cartoon characters, footballers and aircraft. For Scott, these are not stamps in the true sense of the word. In contrast, Goaman’s work carries the craft of good design in which the message, the poetic appeal of place, the typography and the brief of the issuing country all cohere in a whole.
Goaman’s designs are now increasingly recognised as classics of good design, objects of aesthetic merit in their own right, as Scott wrote in “The Art of Design: The Stamps of Michael and Sylvia Goaman” in Gibbons Stamp Monthly in 1992. For many, the designs are admired for their elegance.
Goaman was born in 1921, the son of a First World War survivor who worked for the Ministry of Agriculture. Educated at Hereford Cathedral School and Reading School, Goaman spent much of his spare time drawing and accompanied his father on his inspections of farms around Hereford as well as helping with the local haymaking, already enjoying the interest in flora and fauna which is expressed in many of his designs.
Advertisement
He began his training as an artist at Reading School of Art before joining the Navy during the Second World War. Still in his early twenties, he was promoted to captain escorting ships carrying supplies for Britain from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The experiences led to lifelong nautical pursuits. He converted a lifeboat to a ten-berth sailing boat, in which he made many expeditions round the British coast and across the English Channel.
After the war he took up his studies in design at the Central School of Art in London, where he met Sylvia Priestley. Their early courtship took Goaman between his room in Chelsea and J. B. Priestley’s flat in Albany, Piccadilly, where Sylvia was living, and to Paris, where Sylvia studied textile design for a period.
Their circle of acquaintances included the architectural partnership of Chamberlin, Powell & Bon, who designed the Barbican development, Carlos Sancha, the portrait painter, and Faith Jacques, the illustrator.
After leaving the Central School of Art, Goaman worked as a freelance designer, taking on work such as designing posters for Alexander Korda, the film and theatre director. His stamp design career in partnership with Sylvia was launched in 1952, when both of them entered designs for a set of four to mark the Queen’s Coronation in 1953. Goaman painted Sylvia’s design, incorporating national flowers (rose, daffodil, thistle and shamrock). The design won, and so began their career in stamp design.
The designs were featured in an exhibition at the Design Museum, in 1995, and a 1968 Look at Life film on their methods of working was shown nationally in the cinema.
Sylvia died in 2006. Michael Goaman is survived by their three daughters.
Michael Goaman, stamp designer, was born on February 14, 1921. He died on May 13, 2009, aged 88