Mountain paintings: Helmut Ditsch - Rappastein - Liechtenstein 2017 - 380 Rappen

The Argentinian painter Helmut Ditsch supplied the motif for the special stamp “Rappastein” (face value: CHF 3.80). The original painting is around one-and-a-half metres wide and depicts part of Liechtenstein’s mountains including the 2,222-metre-high Rappastein. The freelance artist with Austrian roots, who meanwhile lives in Vaduz, studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. His four sets of work - mountains, desert, ice and water - were created during his thirty years of artistic work. Ditsch reflects his own experience of nature, which he gathers when mountaineering alone, in his paintings as tangibly as possible - which is one reason why the artist rarely refers to landscape painting but instead to communicating nature. His oil paintings that closely resemble photographs, some of which are wall-size, are produced with an enormous amount of physical effort in four steps from the initial sketch until they are finished. The designer Hans Peter Gassner illustrates this gradual production process on the stamp in vertically arranged bars. The special stamp on mountain paintings is available as an 8-stamp miniature sheet.