The mischievous and diabolic art of James Flora (1914-1998):
Glimpses of rare works from the archives
and news about Flora-related projects
Great detail (extracted at the Print & Pattern blog) from Flora's mid-1960s painting The Big Bank Robbery. We issued a limited edition fine art print of the work earlier this year.
Detail from the Lord Buckley 10" EP Hipsters, Flipsters, and Finger-Poppin' Daddies, Knock Me Your Lobes, released on RCA Victor in 1955. Left to right: sports-fan centaur, polycephalic saxophonist, jubilant wench. Body count: three figures, eight legs, four heads.
Flora explains how the brain reacts to stimuli—it's all cogs, pulleys and tiny hammers. Another (see below) illustration from the November-December 1944 issue of Columbia Coda.
Illustration, Columbia Coda, November-December 1944. The pianist is ... we'll get back to you on that. The clarinetists and violinists, forced to perform incognito due to union regulations, were represented on the session by essential anatomical components attired in boots and bowties.
We've now produced prints for the letters A, C, D, E, G, J, K, N, Q, S, U, and W (14 to go). While developing series 3 over the summer, Barb and I selected "U" (Underestimated) in anticipation of printmaker Dan's and wife Kelly's first child, expected in the fall.
Clover Isabel Ibarra was born 9 lbs, 7 oz at 9:31 pm, Wednesday, October 21, at St. Joseph's Hospital in St. Paul.
No triplets this time.Assisted by our three amazing midwives and a slew of other nurses at St. Joseph's, we attempted innumerable ways to get Clover in the right position and deliver her through a natural child birth. The labor was extremely hard on Kelly (as 72 hours of labor can be) and in the end we exhausted all options and had to perform a Caesarian. Although we really struggled hard to avoid as little medical intervention as possible it turns out that complications with the umbilical cord around the baby's neck and the position of her head prevented anything of the sort.
Clover was amazingly tough through the whole labor, rarely ever showing any fluctuation in heart rate or stamina. Some people say that how we are born is very telling of our personality. If that's the case, this new little girl is already the toughest, most cool-headed girl we've ever known. (Maybe Clover Eastwood might have been a better name?)
NOW AVAILABLE: the next four works in the Primer for Prophets screen print series. Cool Flora illustrations of the American nuclear family during the 1950s, when grocers employed stockdogs, crows fought tug-of-war over lingerie, and cigarettes were obligatory in the obstetrics ward. The images derive from a 1954 trade-only alphabet booklet that Flora illustrated for CBS-TV, depicting consumer markets for prospective TV advertisers.
Our large (20" x 20") Mambo For Cats limited edition screen print is almost sold out. We're now offering a miniature (7" x 7") giclée open edition print of this renowned Flora 1955 RCA Victor LP cover. At $25.00, it's a great alternative for those on a limited budget—or with limited wall space.
Three jazz legends, stacked, in the July 1952 issue of Coda, Columbia's new release monthly. From the top:
Back in stock: letterpress-printed cards with cool 1940s and '50s music and turntable illustrations by Flora. The cards were designed and printed by our friends at Yee-Haw Industrial Letterpress, in Knoxville. Packaged in sets of four: Dig You Later, Stardust Moon, Deluxe-O-Tone, and Trees.
Perhaps the kid dropped his bag of trick-or-treat candy (and shed his costume) sprinting for safety. Illustration from introductory chapter of A Red Skel(e)ton in Your Closet, a 1965 anthology of "ghost stories gay and grim" selected for young readers by popular film & TV comedian Red Skelton. The book contains 21 interior illustrations which are uncredited, but Flora's trademarks are unmistakable. The artist was under contract to Harcourt, Brace at the time, and in all probability was prohibited from artist attribution for illustrations in children's books issued by other publishers (this volume was a Grosset & Dunlap title). The best of the Skel(e)ton illustrations were reproduced in our recent book, The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora.
Dummy pages, Gene Krupa and his Columbia recording orchestra, demo booklet, 1941, part of a series of homemade samples prepared by Flora for the Columbia Records art department. Most pages from the booklets (which earned the artist a job at Columbia) were reproduced in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora; three of the above four pages were omitted due to space constraints. We posted another unpublished page from the series here and more Flora artistic impressions of the great jazz drummer Krupa here.
Detail (about two-thirds of the complete work) of an untitled, unpublished tempera on board, ca. mid-1960s. The collection contains a number of similarly composed maritime paintings from this period, though colors and figures vary. If you have our recent book, The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora, compare this setting with Salt Pond—Block Island on page 54.
... this time to a distant galaxy. Or maybe just down the block to the Moon. The genre-surfing Seattle combo has once again (third time) licensed a Jim Flora illustration for a cover, their new 7" vinyl release Agendacide. The above element derives from the April 1963 cover of Computer Design magazine.
The second work, pages away in the same sketchpad, is untitled but appears to be an unfinished draft of the same scene:
It appears that Bessie gained quite a bit of weight between conception and refinement. Then again, Flora might not have had Smith in mind for the pencil and tempera draft. He often changed titles of near-identical works; many sketches were untitled, or assigned working titles which were altered for subsequent variations. A 1940s pencil sketch tagged "Boss Crump" evolved into a painting titled Self-Portrait. We'll never know at what point the artist decided that his resemblance to the legendary Tenneesse pol E. H. Crump was undeniable. A 1942 illustration for Columbia Records depicted conductor Fritz Reiner with four arms, three eyes, two noses and dueling mouths. The exact same figure was revisited in 1998—the similarity is unmistakable—but retitled Daniel Berenboim, another legendary conductor.
We've received no reports of malfunctioning 2009 calendars—every day has thus far been accounted for, in the correct sequence—so we're offering 2010 models, hot off Yee-Haw's industrial presses. The spunky hyperactive figures date from Flora's mid-1950s RCA Victor LP period. Each calendar is letterpress printed one color at a time on card stock, and accessorized with a 12-month tearaway calendar. Buy one ($12.50) or a set of three at the Little Shop of Flora's.
Taking a break from conjuring bonus-limbed mutants and bug-eyed boppers, Flora often sketched maritime culture in his extended backyard. The above untitled pen & ink of a seafood shack was discovered in a travel sketchbook that contained dozens of the artist's impressions of Italy and France, several dated 1962. Back on his "home surf," Flora filled another two dozen pages of the tablet with southern Connecticut shoreline vignettes and briny motifs.
Eric Reynolds has worked at Fantagraphics (our Flora books publisher) for 15 years, mostly as publicist. It's been our pleasure to conduct business with (and, in September 2007, meet) the affable Mr. Reynolds, an admitted Floraphile. He was recently booted upstairs by his bosses to the position of Associate Publisher. A large round of applause for that company move (though we'll miss Eric on the PR end).
Flora rendered the above woodcut for the cover of a collection of short stories by Alvin Frederick Levin, published by Little Man Press in 1940. New Directions Books has just issued Love Is Like Park Avenue, Levin's "unfinished novel," which includes the "Little Alvin" vignettes and a reproduction of Flora's woodcut.
