E.F. Higgins III (1949-2021)

Stamp Artist Profiles Reprinted from Anna Banana's Artist Stamp News, 1992

Higgins grew up in a small town outside Chicago.  Trips to the Field Museum, Museum of Science & Industry and the Chicago Art Institute Museum were probably formative in his later creativity.  As a boy, he made models, bombs, zip-guns, tree houses, mini bikes and collected stamps.

At  15, when his family moved to Ann Arbor, he took poetry and art classes in high school.  As a senior, he did well with his welded sculpture at the local Art Fair.  Higgins attended Western Michigan University, majoring in Art, quitting two weeks before graduating.

Two years later, he finished up; his B.A. at the University of Colorado then went on to graduate school, receiving his M.F.A. in 1976.  While there he majored in painting and printmaking.  With no teaching prospects, he moved to N.Y.C. in 1976 and is still there. As a boy, I collected stamps and carved rubber erasers into rubber stamps.  At the University of Colorado, I was into painting and printmaking; specifically, in ’74 or ’75 working extensively from 2-D objects; play money, stock certificates, stamps, mining claims, postcards, posters, letter-heads, labels, maps, blue-prints…all sorts of “non-Art”, commercially produced 2-D visuals.

Around in there somewhere, I worked at a silk-screen shop, and as a surveyors rodman, and setting type by hand for a rubber stamp shop.  All these things I incorporated into my art.

In 1975 I did 3 sheets of stamps, offset, with the help of a friend, Jim Green, who worked at the local paper at night.

DOO DA, to the best of my recollection, comes from the song Camp Town Ladies, or Zippety Doo Da.  I had realized ya gotta have a name of a country on it if it’s gonna be a stamp, and Doo Da sounded like a good one to me.  The usual, “3P” that I put on them is for the same reason, “gotta have a value,” so 3P for 3 pennies.  (At this time I liked the work of Hieronymus Bosch, VanGogh, Gaugin, Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Warhol, Rauschenberg and Oldenberg.)

Somewhere in there, I started using the “Wingnut” as a logo for Doo Da Post.  This comes from the Midwest slang of a “wingnut” being somewhat off the wall; not manically crazy, but maybe seeming goofy, but faster, like a pun.  Also it seemed to me to fit “art historically” with Hermes and later with Gauloise cigarette labels.  These stamps were printed in unlimited editions, in various colors on various colored gummed paper.

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