Robert Risko: A keen eye and keen perception
- 8 hours ago
- 4 min read
I could make a fatal drinking game for every post I preface by apologizing for the lack of updates. Long story short, this year I’m now teaching both filmmaking and art classes for high schoolers, and creating the new lesson plans, while juggling day to day life events, has kept me pretty busy.
But work on the Amsel documentary continues! I recently did three new interviews for the project – two of which were a long, long time coming.
Since my last trip to the east coast in the summer of 2024 (for filming Brooke Shields in NYC, and a follow up meeting with Howard Feinberg), I’ve come to realize that not every interview can be done in person. Travel costs are prohibitive, and are easily the biggest production expense, no matter how frugal I’ve tried to be.
And let’s face it: I can’t keep delaying things. Better to conduct interviews sooner than later, even if a Zoom meeting means compromising the video picture quality, and sacrificing the impact of a face-to-face meeting.
It’s not just a matter of trying to work out people’s schedules, either. It’s developing a sense of trust, especially when some topics of discussion can be rather sensitive. In many instances for the film, the time between my initial contact with a potential subject and finally filming their interview takes years.
In the case of Robert Risko, it took almost eight.
Risko is a New York based artist whose work for Vanity Fair has become a thing of legend. He was only 25 when recruited (along with photographer Annie Leibovitz and artist Keith Haring) by art director Bea Feitler for shaping the look of the magazine’s relaunch in 1983. His portraits grew so popular that they became synonymous with the publication, and captured the cultural eye of New York’s leading entertainers and fashionista.
His career started in Andy Warhol’s Factory, contributing to the artist’s INTERVIEW Magazine (nicknamed "The Crystal Ball of Pop”), as well as illustrations for Rolling Stone and The New Yorker.
Risko’s often described as a caricaturist of celebrity portraits, yet such a description seems both strangely too vague and too limiting. His stylized airbrushed illustrations – part cartoonish and humorous, always insightful and revealing – evoke the retro Art Deco fashion that was a staple of 1980s glamor and sparkle. For a celebrity to have their own Risko portrait is a milestone greater than a framed caricature at Sardi’s or The Palm.
That kind of pedigree alone makes Risko a fascinating interview subject. (I daresay he warrants a documentary of his own in the near future.) But as he was also a personal friend of Richard Amsel’s, I knew Risko’s participation in my film was something to be grateful for.
After years of chatting through emails and social media, Risko called me up on the phone a few weeks ago. My ears perked up. “I’m in,” he said.
Thus began our first phone conversation. All three hours and forty-eight minutes of it.
No doubt we were justified in making up for lost time.
“Let’s figure out how to do this,” Risko said, as we wrapped things up. I think we could have talked another few hours had I not a full bladder and a class to prep for the next day. And so we scheduled a follow up interview via Zoom for inclusion in the film.
“Richard had a dark energy about him,” Risko confessed. It was the kind of telling insight I’d been struggling to find throughout most of my interviews, despite the many, more lighthearted testimonials about the man. It’s not that there was friction between the two artists. (If anything, Risko described their friendship as fairly outgoing and without tension.) But Richard Amsel was something of an unfinished project, a personality not quite fully formed – or at least, someone not quite comfortable within his own skin.
This seems especially true when my conversation with Risko turned, inevitably, to the topic of AIDS. “It was called GRID at first,” Risko said. “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency.”
He remembers a few of his conversations with Amsel throughout the early days of the epidemic, back in 1981 and 1982 – a period of misinformation, panic, paranoia, and, alas, initial reluctance and denial.
Risko recalled how Edgard Allan Poe’s allegorical tale "The Masque of the Red Death" seemed vividly, nightmarishly prescient to the AIDS era. It was only after our conversation that I belatedly remembered Risko’s own NEW YORKER cover illustration from 2008, featuring the Grim Reaper.
Obviously, not all of our discussions about Richard Amsel involved darkness and gloom. It’d be misleading of me to suggest Risko’s remembrances were seen through a darkened filter. Indeed, Amsel was a man of sharp wit and humor, always welcoming to his friends, appreciative of their company, and very, very much in love with animation and movies.
But testimonials like these are crucial in scratching beneath the surface of a complex, enigmatic figure, and in making a documentary that’s more than simply a hagiographic, superficial valentine to an artist whose work I’ve loved.
For more about Robert Risko’s work, visit:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/riskonyc/