Didier Guedron, born in 1950, was interested in drawing from
an early age. After leaving his secondary education, he joined the engraving
classes of the Ecole Estienne in Paris, where he was initially taught by René
Cottet, and from 1968 by another stamp engraver, Pierre Forget. Guedron
graduated in 1970 and went on to attend the School of Fine Arts in Paris, but
he had to leave after a year, to join the French forces in Germany. There he
met his wife.
In 1973, Guedron was contacted by his former master Forget, who
told him that there was a vacancy at the French stamp printing works after
their engraver Jean Miermont had just retired, and whether he would be
interested. Guedron was accepted and the couple moved back to France.
In 1975, Guedron engraved his first stamp for France; a value from the set promoting the upcoming ARPHILA 1975 stamp exhibition in
Paris. The stamp, available in 1f and 2f values, with its intriguing close-up of an eye, is peculiar in that it
is not officially attributed to Guedron, nor are any of the other three designs
in the set attributed to any other engraver. But Guedron himself has later
confirmed that he was the engraver of this particular value.
Guedron’s philatelic output started off impressively, with
no less than six stamps in five designs being issued in 1973, for various
former French territories. First of those, the 150k value from the Laos World
Meteorological Organisation set, depicting the Chariot of the Sun, was the
start of a good range of stamps for that country. In fact, it would become the
country Guedron would make the most engravings for.
It would turn out to be not only Guedron’s first French stamp,
but also his last. While he kept on engraving stamps for a couple more years,
his wife was unable to find a job in France and so, in 1977, Guedron resigned
and the couple returned to Germany.
There, they would both flourish, with Guedron initially
working as an engraver for a German printing house before he set up his own
advertising agency in the late 1980s. Some twenty years later, after his wife
had passed away, Guedron returned to France, where he bought and restored an
old mill and immersed himself passionately in watercolours.
The above biographical information was taken from an article
written by Jean-François Rotteleur and published in Philao, the bulletin of the
Association internationale des collectionneurs de timbres-poste du Laos (info:
dominiquegeay@wanadoo.fr).
You will find Didier Guedron’s database HERE.