Flora and WFMU: a sustaining relationship

Undetermined media (framed, under glass): print with touch-up, or black tempera, ca. 1968, detail. Another detail posted on December 2.

Our friend Takashi Okada of Tokyo has become the pre-eminent Floraphile in Japan. Besides being an avid customer of Jim Flora fine art prints, Takashi recently designed the Daisy Holiday CD package, which adapts Flora’s 1947 Green Mansions resort brochure illustration (licensed from the Flora estate). Additional Flora elements appear on the jewel case inlay and in the booklet. Here’s a Tokyo record store display flush with Flora. If you don’t live in that part…

REACH! Heck, it’s only pretend gunplay. Detail, Primer for Prophets booklet, commissioned by CBS-TV, 1954.

We’ve finally collected an online gallery of Flora’s 20 children’s books (17 of which he authored). They’re up for viewing at JimFloraArt.com, the Flora family website. While you’re there, the site has had a makeover and includes three pages of original Flora art from the 1990s that’s being offered for sale.

Pen drawing on onionskin paper with glue residue, early 1940s, from scrapbook. This freakish apparition has been blessed by the artist with bonus arms that appear to be appendages of his head, which has a stem on which to balance a coat hanger.

detail, untitled tempera on paper found in sketchbook, ca. mid-1960s

Untitled pen drawing on onionskin paper, early 1940s, from scrapbook. Brownish residue caused by glue applied by the artist, who is also responsible for the irregular trim. There are hundreds of such miniatures in the collection.

Farm scene draft for The Day the Cow Sneezed (1957), Flora’s second children’s book. The landscape image is one of 80 scans Barbara and I recently acquired from the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota. We plan to reproduce a number of these early work pages in our third book of Floriana, currently being compiled and written. Among the artifacts — donated to the University by the artist — was an eye-popping version of…

Detail, untitled tempera on paper, 1970