Get toasted for 2008

Detail, untitled holiday painting, ca. 1951.

These stemware sophisticates also appear on a t-shirt

Sketch, ca. 1951, featuring a draft of the celebratory duo

a little something to wake the neighbors

Detail, March 1943 Columbia-Okeh Popular Records
monthly flyer; panel: Harry James

Merry Flora Christmas 2007

montage by IC using early 1950s Flora details

Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Merry Saturnalia, Happy Festivus—whatever.

Self-Portrait

Self-Portrait, tempera on paper, ca. mid- to late-1940s.

Update OCT 2008: Now available as a limited edition fine art print.

enclosures

untitled modular tempera, ca. 1960s

macrocephalic bovine

Detail, March 1943 Columbia-Okeh Popular Records monthly flyer

panel: Okeh Country Dance, Folk Songs, and Blues

sketchbook, 1950s

Untitled sketches and figures from sketchbook, ca. early 1950s.

The hungry fellow on the bottom looks familiar:

extraterrestrial curiosity

Detail from untitled painting, ca. 1960s
Another detail appears here

science geek 3

Illustration, "The Challenge of Frontier Products Development"
Research and Engineering magazine, cover detail, July 1956

Bubbly Buddies and Bix & Tram t-shirts

Now on eBay: The "Bubbly Buddies" design (above, adapted from an early 1950s Christmas montage painted by Flora), and "Bix and Tram" (below, featuring caricatures from a 1947 Columbia Records album cover).

Flora goes Grammy?

Quartet San Francisco's 2007 CD, Whirled Chamber Music, has been nominated for a Grammy in the category Best Classical Crossover Album. This might be the first-ever album with a Flora cover to earn a Grammy nod.

Jim Flora ink

Since early 2006, Jim Flora Art has partnered with a hip Minneapolis screen printing shop called Aesthetic Apparatus. Dan Ibarra and Mike Byzewski of AA first produced a Mambo For Cats edition of 200, then a Pete Jolly Duo edition of 125. Both prints featured classic Flora 1955 RCA Victor LP covers. A month ago we launched the Primer for Prophets series.

JFA didn't just hire these guys off a Google search—besides their meticulousness and penchant for perfection, the AA team are Floraphiles eager to continue producing new Flora screen print projects. They are also NICE. We like NICE, and we prefer working with NICE.

Here's a video clip of Dan and Mike at work (on a non-Flora project). Their job sounds tortuous.

HT: the so-nice Sara Soskolne

Happy Horns t-shirt

Jim Flora Art LLC just launched the latest in our line of upper body haute couture: the Jim Flora "Happy Horns" t-shirt. The illustration—a jazz buff making cozy with a clarinet and sax—originally appeared on a 1942 record shop retail banner showcasing "Columbia Album Favorites." Our previous shirts were digitally printed. The "Horn Buddies" shirt is our first silk-screened piece of fashionwear.

We also modified a previous shirt: the "Hot Notes" design (featuring a 1941 department store illustration), previously produced on white cotton, is now available in gray as well.

Primer for Prophets prints now on eBay

The long-awaited series of fine-art screen prints PRIMER FOR PROPHETS are now available on eBay. Very cool Flora illustrations of the American nuclear family (and their weird pets) during the 1950s, when people had fried-egg eyes, dog food tins were edible, and teens grew bonus legs!

Subtitled "A Flora '50s A-B-C," the images derive from a 1954 trade-only alphabet booklet titled Primer for Prophets that Flora illustrated for CBS-TV. The booklet was not circulated to the public, but was intended to attract corporate advertisers to the emerging medium of television. Each page featured iconic Flora illustrations of past-tense verbs (A to Z) that reflected daily activities of the typical American family, suggesting products they would purchase.

The first four prints produced are "ATE," "DROVE," "JIVED," and "SMOKED." They are available as single prints or as a set.

The PRIMER series was produced in a limited edition of 100 by Minneapolis screen studio Aesthetic Apparatus. Production specs are detailed in the eBay listings. Each print is hand-numbered and authenticated.

Over the next few years, we'll extend the series to cover the entire alphabet. The PRIMER illustrations reflect Flora at his post-war commercial peak. That same year, he began illustrating RCA Victor album covers, creating some of his most popular images (such as Mambo for Cats). The PRIMER characters are consistent with the best of his RCA album sleeves.

NOTE: The 10-day eBay listings for these prints have expired, but the prints are now available through JimFlora.com. The above links go directly to the individual print pages on the site.

fragmented violinist

untitled illustration, business card, 1950s

critter chemistry

Detail, Grand Opening Migraine, a.k.a., Behind the Green Door
(both titles penciled on reverse)
painting, ca. 1974

Organizational Quotient

Compiling a resumé?

Illustration, Research & Engineering, April 1956

Waltz Time

Waltz Time, pen and ink on card stock
n/d (early 1990s), titled in pencil

Jim Flora greeting cards

Now on eBay:
Spanky new from Jim Flora Art LLC and Yee-Haw Industrial Letterpress, Knoxville: three different sets of four unique cards each. The cards are hand-printed letterpress on recycled paper and come bundled with kraft envelopes in a clear sleeve. Fun to mail, funner to receive, but also klassy-kool for framing.
Above: quartet of 1955 hepcats from the "Plant You Now, Dig You Later" set. Below, the "Deluxe-O-Tone" line of retro-record players (1940s- and 1950s-era):
Here's the "Stardust" series (1954 illustrations):

boats, bird

Detail, Baltimore, tempera on paper, ca. mid-1960s