Strange missives from Kurt Vargo are adding considerably to the visual interest of the ordinary pouch of U.S. mail these days. Unsuspecting letter carriers, while sorting standard 4"-by-9" business envelopes and 9"-by-12" manila mailers, may come upon distant walled castles, utopian cities, groves of oddly shaped trees or alarming swarms of flying sushi. Vargo, a New York-based illustrator, began conjuring up these extraordinary visions and enlivening the mundane purviews of the postal system with their colorful energy in an effort to keep boredom at bay. "The whole idea came from doing a promotion mailing, " he recalls, "with 2500 mailers, 2500 stamps and 2500 envelopes. At a certain point, it became so monotonous that I had to instill some sort of interest in doing it day after day after day for two weeks. So I set apart 50 envelopes that I wanted to decorate and that became a breath of fresh air."

Without any plans or sketches, Vargo begins by scraping pastels across the surface of the plain white envelope, allowing the brilliance and pattern of the colors to suggest the components of a landscape. Some of these components are rendered, also in pastel; but other images are akin to those in Vargo's portfolio of commercial assignments-enjoying new incarnations here as rubber stamps. A telephone originally done for Medical Economics magazine now bears Vargo's number and appears regularly above the return address. A cyclist once representing an Olympic bike racer for an article in Lotus magazine now appears in the guise of a messenger. As he does in his work for clients, Vargo often invests the lifeless objects in these landscapes with animate presence. That one envelope can take as long as two hours, thus prolonging the time invested in the mailing, doesn't concern him. What's important is that doing them sustains his interest.

Even as a child, Vargo found drawing a way to make life more interesting. In high school, a guidance counselor steered him to the School of Visual Arts, where he studied illustration with Marshall Arisman, Jack Endewelt, Philip Hayes, and Jerry Moriarty, graduating in 1972. Even before he finished school, his portfolio of paintings had begun to bring him freelance jobs. Over the next four years, however, he grew increasingly dissatisfied with his work. "There was serious focus in the paintings that wasn't inherent in me, " he explains. "I like things that are more humorous or ironic. " With the idea that this humorous view of life might be marketable, Vargo stopped painting and began to prepare a portfolio of black-and-white cartoons. After a time, he started working in color and showing the new portfolio. "Slowly but surely, " he recalls, "it started to seep in."

Since 1980, Vargo has been working steadily, producing humorous illustration for editorial and, occasionally, advertising clients. He draws his inspiration from an eclectic mix of cartoonists and painters, including Winsor McCay, Saul Steinberg, Willem de Kooning, Fernand Leger, Alexander Calder and George Herriman. "I found," he observes, "that the landscapes on the envelopes-the shrubbery-subconsciously came out of Krazy Kat's Arizona hometown cliffs."

Although he often experiments with cut paper, painted wood and a variety of other media, Vargo's work for clients is usually in pen-and-ink and gouache, or a mixture of gouache and acrylic. "I can work fast enough so that, by the second day, it's done and I can think about something else," he says. "I like to spend three or four days on a job and that's it. Anything longer than that and I'm bored to death."

Doing the envelopes made Vargo realize that he could work even faster and more spontaneously in pastels. He also sensed that art directors might be confused by the contrast between the bright, freewheeling spirit of the envelopes and the tighter, more controlled expression on the self-promotional composite of printed jobs he was making; so he started to send the envelopes without anything inside. "The overwhelming response is that this is a direction I should explore as a portfolio, " Vargo says.

Never one to put off investigating what seems to be a good idea, Vargo has already begun work on a new series of envelopes. They are larger-as big as 18" by 24"; they feature a new vocabulary of rubber stamps-among them, a Tyrannosaurus rex and groups of tiny people, some of whom are running; they concentrate less on the landscape and more on the figures; and Vargo won't consider them complete until they've been mailed and dutifully manhandled by the postal service. "They excite me, " says Vargo, "because I see endless potential in them."