Our most prolific living stamp artist
Mörck is a Norwegian-Swedish, born to a Norwegian father and a Swedish mother in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1955. Both of his parents were artists. His mother was a textile artist while his father was a graphic artist and painter.
His father, as a stamp collector, introduced Martin to engraved stamps early, and Mörck started engraving his own artwork in copper at age fourteen. In 1975, Mörck joined Sweden Post as a stamp engraver apprentice and a year later he decided to continue his stamp artistry career as a freelancer. Since 1977, Mörck has designed and/or engraved many stamps, philatelic items, banknotes and private artwork.
Today, Mörck is the most productive living stamp designer and engraver in the world. As of now, he has collectively designed and/or engraved more than 900 different stamp motifs issued by 28 postal administrations. In addition to stamp motifs, he designed and/or engraved many souvenir sheet backgrounds. The majority of Mörck’s stamps have been collectively issued by the eight Scandinavian/Nordic postal administrations.
Mörck has made the majority of his stamp engravings using the hand engraving technique in which the engraver carves a mirror image, (negative) by way of lines, dashes and dots, onto a soft steel plate using varieties of a special tool called burin under a magnifier as seen in figure 1. The engraver makes stage die proofs by applying ink to the plate by hand during this process to ensure that the work is progressing according to plan. After the steel plate engraving is finished, the engraved image on the plate is transferred to printing cylinders in technically challenging labour-intensive steps for intaglio printing. This is a traditional way of stamp engraving.
Hand engraving is a laborious process to learn, requiring a long apprenticeship, a highly developed artistic sense, a steady hand and patience. Hand engraving is now becoming a dying art form. Since hand engraving and its printing transfer is a time consuming and expensive process, most of the postal administrations that historically issued hand-engraved
