About This Stamp
Celebrate the beauty and serenity of snow with Winter Landscapes, a booklet of 20 stamps, featuring five winter scenes. Perfect for cards, invitations, and gift-bearing envelopes and packages, these photographs of snow-covered landscapes will add charm to all your mailings.
One stamp features two brilliant red barns that strikingly contrast with the surrounding snow, sky, and trees (John Moore, photographer). The landscapes in two other stamps focus on the beauty of freshly fallen snow: One image shows a long fence bounded by tall trees laden with snow-covered branches (Juanita Phillips, photographer). The other features willowy evergreens shrouded in snow, highlighted against a cloudy sky and far-off hills (Katherine Plessner, photographer). A fourth stamp shows a mass of icicles suspended against a fiery sunset and a backdrop of frozen waves (Carson O’Ffill photographer), while the final stamp depicts a house surrounded by frosty pines set against a deep pastel sky (Mike Blottenberger, photographer).
Art director Ethel Kessler designed the stamps with existing photographs.
The Winter Landscapes stamps are being issued as Forever® stamps in booklets of 20. These Forever stamps will always be equal in value to the current First-Class Mail® one-ounce price.
Stamp Art Director, Stamp Designer
Ethel Kessler
Ethel Kessler is an award-winning designer and art director who has worked with corporations, museums, public and private institutions, professional service organizations, and now, the United States Postal Service.
After earning a B.F.A. in visual communications from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Kessler worked as a graphic designer and project manager for the exhibits division of the United States Information Agency. Her work was distributed internationally on subjects such as Immigration, Entrepreneurship, Renovation of American Cities, and the Bicentennial of 1976. She was also responsible for exhibits in Morocco, Botswana, and El Salvador.
In 1981, she established Kessler Design, Inc., for which she is creative director and designer. Clients have included the Clinton Government reorganization, the Smithsonian Institution, National Geographic Television, the National Park Service, and the American Institute of Architects.
She has been an art director for the U.S. Postal Service’s stamp development program for more than 25 years. As an art director for USPS, Kessler has been responsible for creating more than 500 stamp designs, including the Breast Cancer Research stamp illustrated by Whitney Sherman. Issued in 1998, the stamp is still on sale and has raised more $98 million for breast cancer research. Other Kessler projects include the popular and highly regarded Nature of America 120 stamp series, a collaboration with nationally acclaimed nature illustrator John Dawson, the 12-year Lunar New Year series with Kam Mak, the American Filmmaking: Behind the Scenes 10 stamps issued in 2003, a 2016 pane of stamps celebrating the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, and the 2023 stamp honoring Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And many, many others.