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…

On one of his earliest album covers for Columbia Records, Flora, with typical anatomical perversity, endowed jazz drummer Gene Krupa with four legs and five arms, the better to swat a Mattel-sized trap set amid a lemon meringue backdrop. Krupa’s face also got a makeover—the red and black checkerboard skin tint was Flora’s way of proclaiming, “I can’t do likeness!” (The cover was featured in The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora.) FF to the early…

This three-tiered illustration appeared in the January 25, 1955, issue of Look magazine, accompanying an article by Fletcher Knebel entitled “The Welfare State is Here to Stay.” It reappears in our new book, The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora. The Nanny State storyline caught the attention of our friend, economics blogger (and Floraficionado) Donald Luskin, who asked permission to post it at poorandstupid.com. The original illustration has not been found, and most likely wasn’t…

A Flora zoo would be a wondrous place to take your three-armed, six-eyed kids. The animals are exotic—often you can’t tell what species they belong to. Dogs and pigs, cats and cows, monkeys and donkeys—Flora rendered them with affection but disdained the laws of zoology. In Floraworld, four-legged critters could fly or drive cars, and the color of their fur or hide was a Pantone dart-toss. Here’s a curious Flora bestiary (montage by Barb). More…

Flora + cats + the mambo = a 1955 record cover that bags beaucoups bucks on eBay and nobody even cares if there’s a disc inside because they aren’t bidding for the music. We can’t sell you copies of this rare LP, but if you’d like a 20″ x 20″ limited edition, numbered, archival, acrylic silk-screen print of this iconic Flora design, click here. If you don’t want it on your wall, but prefer it…

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

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…

We’ve posted several complete Flora works below. However, one mission of this blog is to post details of Flora’s complex artistic madscapes. There are several reasons, not the least being our desire to spark surprise when we publish complete works in future books. Details serve as teasers. However, in a Flora mise-en-scène the details are “complete” works unto themselves. Isolating figures provides an opportunity for closer scrutiny. A typical image-dense Flora montage so overwhelms the…

Untitled page from sketchbook (ca. 1940s, tempera and pencil)