artist at rest

Today in 1914, James Royer Flora was born in Bellefontaine, Ohio. Above our guy is pictured relaxing at home in the late 1980s. Interesting juxtaposition of bold patterns, with hunting jacket, slacks and chair vying for focal primacy. Cameo in the upper right by the Fab Four, depicted in 1964, tho it appears to be a hand-rendered (probably not by Flora) replica of a famous photo.

Flora's daughter Julia provides some family context:

I love this picture; this is exactly the way I'll always remember him, with that great head of hair and his flair (?) for mixing plaids (we used to tease him about that all the time). I'm fairly sure it was my brother Robert that took it and probably for some kind of promo shot Dad asked him to create.

In the early 1970s, Flora rendered an autobiographical montage, The First Five Years, in acrylic on wood. The work featured six stacked tiers depicting incidents during the artist's childhood. We posted one tier in December 2008. Here's another:

At the Cabin

That's the title of the new CD by Seattle's quirky genre-blending jazz ensemble Reptet. It's the group's fourth release to feature a licensed Jim Flora illustration (all usages initiated by the band's drummer, John Ewing). Information about Reptet, their music, and the gatefold letterpress CD package (designed by Tom Parson) can be found at the Artists Recording Collective. The above image is an inverted detail from Flora's masterful 1951 woodcut Railroad Town.

Ohio

This three-tiered montage appeared in Fortune magazine in 1947 as part of a 48-state series sponsored by the Container Corporation of America. Flora, an Ohio native, was commissioned to illustrate his birth state. A color version—as it ran in Fortune—was reproduced in The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora. Tearsheets turn up periodically on Ebay.

The above greyscale version—presumably the original, described as "watercolor, gouache, and pencil on paperboard"—is in the Smithsonian collection, according to their online catalog. It's not clear if the original is black and white and colorization was added at the magazine print stage, or if the image was converted to greyscale for the Smithsonian's database. A phone call to the Smith would resolve the matter. It's on our to-do list.

The Stationmaster's Daughter

The full title of this undated (early- to mid-1940s) work is The Rape of the Stationmaster's Daughter, a tempera on paper, titled in pencil on the reverse. It was reproduced in our second Flora anthology, The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora, and its anatomically absurd actors were adapted by designer Laura Lindgren for the cover. In 2008 we issued a fine art print.

A customer purchased a print last month and expressed admiration at the quality of both the work and the replica. But truth to tell, our Stationmaster print has not sold well. I suspect the subject matter creeps people out. It's sinister and diabolic—and goes beyond mere mischief. Who wants a cartoonish depiction of a sexual-assault-in-progress adorning the living room?

Yet this work will always be special to me. At the time Barbara Economon and I compiled our first book, The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora, in 2004, we had seen very little of Flora's early fine art. He was primarily known for his album covers and commercial music iconography, topical magazine illustrations, and children's books. What fine art of Flora's we had seen consisted mostly of his large, late-period maritime canvases, which did not capture our interest.

When I was first shown (by Flora's family) his fine art collection in storage on a rainy Saturday in October 2005, one of the first works pulled from a jammed portfolio was Stationmaster. I ogled it with amazement. It was gorgeous, even as it was disturbing. It was a depiction of evil, yet it had a magical quality, transporting me to another world, revealing the deeper Flora artistic vision that had been a family heirloom to that point. I didn't see darkness in the tableau. The aged, pigment-soaked paper evoked the privately creative side of Flora during the 1940s. I never forgot that moment: the birth of an obsession.

We don't know if the work was based on a historical incident or simply reflects Flora exorcising his demons with a paint brush. Barbara's color-matched print faithfully captures the original, right down to the muddy backwash. You can almost feel the brushstrokes.

cow chaos

Tempera overlay, The Day the Cow Sneezed, 1957, courtesy the Dr. Irvin Kerlan Collection, University of Minnesota Children's Literature Research Center.

The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora

A lengthy gestation period: our new book, conceived two years ago, is today born. Fantagraphics, with godlike dominion, declared July 29 as the official publication date of The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora, our third anthology.

Purchase at: Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, or from Fantagraphics. Doesn't matter to us. Buy it. Here's what you'll discover:

Like its two predecessors, The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora (2004) and The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora (2007), this anthology celebrates a visionary whose work is steeped in vari-hued paradox. Flora's figures are fun while threatening; playful yet dangerous; humorous but deadly. His helter-skelter arabesques are clustered with strangely contorted critters of no identifiable species, juxtaposed amid toothpick towers and trombones twisted into stevedore knots. Down his streets lurch demonic mutants sporting fried-egg eyes, dagger noses, and bonus limbs. Yet, despite the raucous energy projected in these hyperactive mosaics, a typical Flora freak circus often projects harmony and balance — an ordered chaos.

The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora features paintings, drawings, and sketches from the 1940s through the 1990s — many never previously published or exhibited; more artifacts from the artist's 1940s tenure in the Columbia Records art department; and vintage newspaper and magazine illustrations. Several galleries feature never-before circulated children's book drafts and abandoned concepts that pre-date Flora's commercial success as an avatar of kid-lit.

Footnote: Any online description that says the book contains "a 1984 interview with award-winning graphic designer Robert M. Jones, who offers priceless insights," is erroneous. We had planned to include the Jones interview at the time we were obliged to provide a far-in-advance book description for the distributor's catalog, but decided to save the interview for a future book. The Fantagraphics site has the most accurate book description.

radio: the better ticket to reach customers

Detail, Columbia Broadcasting System trade brochure, 1943 or '44

modules

Detail, untitled tempera, ca. 1950-51. Above are eight of about 65 individual modules arrayed on the entire work. The elements are stylistically reminiscent of the Railroad Town woodcut, and cubicle art is a recurrent Flora motif.

elemental train

Detail, untitled tempera on paper, 1970

predator train

early 1940s pencil sketch adapted for
Robert Lowry short story "The Monkey Cane,"
appearing in Gup (Little Man Press, 1942)

CCA train and bull

Detail, "Ohio," illustration for Container Corporation of America

Fortune magazine, 1947

The Rape of the Stationmaster's Daughter

New Jim Flora fine art print launched on eBay.

Two prints offered @ Buy-It-Now price of $250/ea. Not mentioned in item description: we have already sold prints 17/20 and 18/20; after the two launch prints sell, the next two released prints (15/20 and 16/20) will be offered at $300 via JimFlora.com.

Elements of this early 1940s tempera were adapted for the cover of The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora.

Gup traincar

Spot illustration, Gup: 3 Adventures, Little Man Press, 1942

Stationmaster train

Detail from The Rape of the Stationmaster's Daughter, an undated early 1940s tempera on paper. Elements of this work were adapted by designer Laura Lindgren for the cover of The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora, and the complete painting was featured in the book. On the production schedule for March 2008: the fine art print.

little red caboose

Detail, Joel Flora birth announcement, July 1947
Image courtesy Richard Loffer

sooted up for work

Along with beasties, boppers and boats, trains were a perennial Flora motif. During the Great Depression he defrayed his tuition costs for the Art Academy of Cincinnati by working the moon-tan shift at a railyard. His uncle Charlie Royer (sketched below in the early 1990s, some sixty years later) was an engineer.

Flora wrote in 1988:

My uncle John Royer was night foreman of the Cincinnati Railroad Terminal Roundhouse. He was able to get me a job wiping the soot off the huge old steam locomotives. I would go to art school from 9:00 A.M. until 4:00 P.M. and then work in the roundhouse from 5:00 P.M. until 1:00 A.M. It then took me an hour and a half to get from work to my furnished room and to bed by 3:00 A.M. I was always yawning from lack of sleep.

Besides sleep deprivation, the job afflicted Flora with black spots on his lungs. Late in life, he could afford to be nostalgic about the railyard, secure in the knowledge that he could ride through it—and artfully render it—without ever again having to work in it.

Train arriving on track two

A portion of an illustration for Park East magazine (June 1952).

Train kept a-rollin'

Choo-choo, woo-woo! Another small segment from a larger work (also featured in its entirety in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora). No date attributed to this work, nor is it titled, but its whistle has a familiar refrain.

Jim Flora's affinity for the railroad yard and its denizens dates back to the mid-1930s when he returned to his home state of Ohio after exploring a brief scholarship granted to him by the Boston Architectural League, unfortunately cut short by economic hardships of the Depression. Flora's uncle, a night foreman for the Cincinnati Railroad Terminal Roundhouse, procured the architectural dropout a job wiping soot from steam locomotives for 25 cents an hour. It was nephew Jim's rent gig for the next two years while he attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati.