Once upon a time, Jim Riswold was in advertising and then he got real sick and quit advertising to make what real sick art featuring the likes of Hitler, Custer, Stalin, Mao, Cancer, WWI, Howdy Doody, and Kim Jong-un as a big fat lollipop.
Riswold often blathers on about how he went from a career selling things people don’t need to making things people don’t want.
In other words, Riswold overestimated the Hitler Art Market, the Custer Art Market, the Stalin Art Market, the Mao Art Market, the Cancer Art Market, the WWI Art Market, the Howdy Doody Art Market, the Lenin Art Market, and the Kim Jong-un/Big Fat Lollipop Art Market.
In 2017, the half-crazed Judith Regan published Riswold’s Hitler Saved My Life. It’s about bad art and bad health. Judith overestimated the Riswold/Hitler/Cancer Book Market.
Recently, Riswold overestimated the Lenin Art Market in some work to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution called Still Life with Lenin.
Riswold is currently working on some stuff about the Dumb Confederacy that he doesn’t know what to call yet but is certain he has overestimated the Dumb Confederacy Art Market.
Have you designed a stamp before?
Although I’m no philatelist, much less a decent graphically inclined one, I have designed stamps before, big-assed ones with perforations and everything!* I have made big-assed stamps for Mary Lasker, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, and Colonel Klink, Nazi star of Hogan’s Heroes.**
What was the most interesting or fun aspect of designing a poster stamp?
It was joyous applying that walking outhouse of a president, whom I refer to as The Surreal Orange, fucking ugly orange face to a stamp of no postal value.
Tell us about the art. Did you create something new for this stamp?
I got tired of people hectoring me to do perversely whimsical Trump Art. I bowed to pressure and slapped The Surreal Orange together and the stamps where just the icing on the fucking ugly orange cake. Add to it The Surreal Orange’s recent blathering and incoherent tirades against the United States Postal Service it seems it looked like I knew what I was doing, which is quite far from the truth.
Anything else?
Keep the faith; but build a bunker.
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* Jim’s prior stamps are shown below.
** Werner Klemperer, a Jewish actor, played the bungling doofus camp kommandant Colonel Klink. The irony of this fact should not be lost on anyone of reasonable intelligence.
Oberst Wilhelm Klink stamp, by Jim Riswold, unpublished
Postal Workers of the World, Unite, 2012, 19 x 22″ digital print, edition of 10
KGL Kierkegaard, 2009, 20 x 26″ digital print, edition of 10
Mailing Hegel, 2009, 20 x 24″ digital print, edition of 10
Special Delivery Kant, 2009, 20 x 24″ digital print, edition of 10
The Fairy Godmother of Medical Research (Portrait of Mary Lasker), 2013, Color digital print, 30 x 36″