- Gregory Solman

In two years, Jim Riswold could make medical history. And he is hoping to permanently infect the art world even sooner.

Having transformed himself from a notorious creative director to impious pop artist during a five-year battle with cancer, Riswold, 50, says he's gone from "a career of selling people things they don't need to making things that people don't want."

That's Riswold's style in a nutshell: self-deprecating humor with a dab of épater le bourgeois thrown in. But he's hardly accurate about either career. In 14 years at Wieden + Kennedy, Riswold created some of Nike's most famous ad campaigns, including "Spike and Mike" ('91), "Bo Knows" ('89-90) and Charles Barkley's "I Am Not a Role Model" ('93).

Riswold joined the Portland, Ore., shop in 1984, when the agency was just 2 years old, as co-founder Dan Wieden's first copywriter hire and by his 10th anniversary was named a partner. He was kicked off the Nike business seven times. "I have a big f***ing mouth," he says.

Riswold's art has been equally difficult to digest for some. A recent exhibit poking fun at famous artist sacred cows like Andy Warhol inspired one art critic, Jen Graves of The Stranger, to make the unusual plea that Riswold be drummed out of the art world. His first solo series in 2005, "Goring's Lunch," assaulted some of the 20th century's worst people like Hitler and Mussolini by contrasting their egomaniacal imagery with American consumerist deflation and plasticity, making them look "small, childish and trifling," he says. "Hitlermobile" (2004), for example, shows an action-figure-size dictator in a red and yellow plastic car with oversize wheels.

Showings that started at Portland's Augen Gallery culminated in Riswold's September 2005 Esquire essay "Hitler Saved My Life," which can be found at jimriswold.com, along with a sampling of art, writing and Riswold's jingle, a cross between '60s cartoon theme songs and AM-radio DJ promos. "Did Picasso have a jingle?" Riswold asks. "You see? I win!"

"I just wanted to see if I could do something more in my life," says Riswold of his transformation from "fake advertising exec to fake artist," as he puts it. "I just figured, what's the worst thing that can happen? Someone calls me ham-fisted or pretentious, or I'd wind up poor, but I'd be dead soon anyway."

Coming from Riswold, that's not the hollow humor of arty nihilism. He resigned from active duty at Wieden in 2003 when he was stricken with a rare form of cancer, chronic myeloid leukemia. His chances of survival were so poor he became one of the first patients to try the experimental drug STI571 (now Gleevec). "My oncologist happens to have developed it," Riswold says. "I guess I got the wrong disease at the right time in the right city."

By the end of 2005, Riswold's health had "dramatically improved." Now he's months from a declaration of complete remission. "It hasn't come back," he says. "In two more years, I might be the first Gleevec cure."

In the meantime, Riswold plans to be unrelenting in artistic production and loyal to his buddies still in advertising. Lately he's been freelancing for cronies at 72andSunny, JWT and Butler Shine Stern & Partners. "They give me lots of money to yell at them as if they're still working for me, even though it's the other way around," he says. And he still consults at Wieden + Kennedy, which provides his health insurance. "It's f***ing expensive to not die," he laughs.

"I consider what I do 'absurd realism' because it is absurd that it gets hung and absurd that people buy it," says Riswold, whose next artistic venture is to create a one-man show of his Esquire essay and an exhibition that will "laugh" at cancer. "Making art makes me happy, it makes me laugh and my son likes it -- so there, that's good enough for me."