About This Stamp
Decorating with evergreens during the winter holiday season is a popular and appealing tradition. The U.S. Postal Service joins in the winter celebrations by issuing beautiful Forever® stamps, featuring close-up views of the foliage and cones of four different conifers: ponderosa pine, eastern red cedar, blue spruce, and balsam fir.
The artist, the late Ned Seidler, was a gifted painter of nature subjects. When painting flora, he frequently used cuttings from plants and trees in his own yard as reference. He may have taken the same approach in working on this project.
Stamp Art Director, Stamp Designer
Howard E. Paine
A member of the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee before being named an art director in 1981, Howard E. Paine supervised the design of more than 400 U.S. postage stamps. After three decades as an art director for the U.S. Postal Service, he retired in 2011.
For more than 30 years Paine was an art director for the National Geographic Society, where he redesigned National Geographic magazine, developed the children’s magazine, National Geographic World, and designed Explorers Hall. A popular lecturer, he has spoken at Yale University and New York University, among others, and presented programs for the National Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution. A judge for numerous art shows and design competitions, Paine also taught magazine design at The George Washington University.
Paine had been a stamp collector since childhood. In 2000, he designed the catalog for Pushing The Envelope: The Art of the Postage Stamp, an exhibit of original stamp art at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Howard Paine died on September 13, 2014.