Dummy page, Columbia’s Children’s Album Sets, demo booklet, 1941, part of a series of homemade samples prepared by Flora for the Columbia Records art department. Flora was living in Cincinnati at the time, an Art Academy grad, newly married, barely making ends meet as a freelance commercial illustrator, and sidelining on Little Man Press projects with Robert Lowry. Within a year, Columbia art director Alex Steinweiss offered Flora a job. Within two years, Flora had…

The services of this formerly out-of-work conductor (name: “Barlow”) have been retained for our next book, The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora, scheduled for August publication by Fantagraphics. Barlow has been hired as the volume’s Gallery Guide. As such, he will stand sentinel-like at the beginning of each book section, with dotted lines emerging from his torso indicating chapter titles orbiting in close proximity. He earned the nod over six competing spot illustrations, who…

Detail, The Depot Fire, tempera on paper, 1963. This is about one-third of the entire work, which will be fully reproduced in our forthcoming book, The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora. We reviewed printer’s proofs of the pages this week, and the book is on schedule for publication by Fantagraphics in August or September.

Two characters, five legs. This acrylic on canvas (15-3/4″ x 20″, late 1990s) almost made it into our forthcoming book, but was edged out by a plethora of prominent works. Flora produced some interesting, mystifying paintings in his final decade (after, by his own admission, “painting myself out of boats” in the late 1980s). Above is a low-grade snapshot corrected in Photoshop; the recently discovered work has not yet been professionally documented. A postulant is…

Paris had this unnamed gargantuan invader. In the foreground, a Van Dyke-bearded, top-hatted anatomical spare part flees from impending carnage, his method of self-propulsion unknown. Spot illustration, Columbia Coda, Nov-Dec. 1943, having something to do with composer Frederick Delius—but after reading the booklet’s accompanying text, we’re not certain what.

Detail, Inside Sauter-Finegan RCA Victor LP cover, 1954. I bought this record at a yard sale in 1974 just for the sleeve illustration, which graced my living room wall. Never got around to dropping the needle on the vinyl. But you can listen to (and watch) Bill (Finegan) and Eddie (Sauter) on YouTube.

Spot illustration, table of contents page Columbia Disc Digest, April 1946

One of over 40 pocket-sized tempera illustrations Flora rendered in the mid-1940s for an apparently never-published edition of Thomas Wolfe‘s Look Homeward, Angel. Illustrations survive for all chapters save one (chapter 30), as well as for the title page, colophon (above), and the book’s three sectional divides. No documentation exists in the archives explaining the destiny or disposition of the series. Several illustrations were published in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora; the rest…

Takashi Okada of Tokyo alerts us that volume 2 of his kitty-themed LP sleeve anthologies will be published imminently. The cover (above) features — well, it doesn’t quite feature Flora’s Mambo For Cats, but the artwork does play a “supporting role.” The photographer is apparently distracting the cover model with a cheezburger.

The Rover Boys, tempera on board, ca. 1943. The work was presented as a wedding gift to Clara Gee Kastner and Stanley Stamaty, Flora’s classmates and friends from the Art Academy of Cincinnati. (Clara and Stan are the parents of cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty.) No idea if the triple-headed figure was intended to portray the Rover lads of literary fame. The work was reproduced in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora A pen and…