Filed Under: "1960s"

Illustration, “When the Night Wind Howls,” by W.S. Gilbert, anthologized in A Red Skel(e)ton In Your Closet: Ghost Stories—Gay and Grim, selected and edited by actor/comic Red Skelton. The cover of this 1965 children’s book was illustrated by the great Al Hirschfeld. The dozen-plus interior illustrations are unsigned and uncredited, but they reflect the unmistakable mischief of Mr. Flora.

Another vintage Flora illustration adorns a record cover: Charles Wuorinen‘s Duos CD (Albany Records, January 2009 scheduled release). The untitled tempera of pink, green, and brown criss-crossing pedestrians dates from the early 1960s. The CD joins a growing gallery of new releases carrying the Flora album cover tradition into the 21st century. Thanks to Howard Stokar, executive producer of the CD, for requesting the cover image. Update (Jan. 12): CD now available.

This untitled tempera from the mid-1960s is currently in production as a silk-screen print by Aesthetic Apparatus, based in Minneapolis. It will be released with a companion print—different theme, but identical color palette. Both works, previously uncirculated, were discovered in a sketchbook in the Flora archives. We’ll post the other print shortly. Aesthetic Apparatus produced our Mambo For Cats and Pete Jolly Duo LP cover screen prints, as well as our Primer for Prophets series.

Illustration detail, “Long Day’s Journey Into the Insomniac’s Night”New York Times Magazine, October 1, 1967

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

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

We don’t change header images at JimFlora.com every week; headers change as often as you refresh the page. There are more than a dozen frisky images in random rotation, with two new ones added — and two old ones shelved — every couple of weeks. They don’t rotate in sequence; you might have to refresh 50X to view them all. There’s also a half-dozen footers, in case you’re inclined to scroll downward. Detail, Saturday Night…

“Paradises Lost,” illustrationVenture: The Traveler’s WorldJune 1964 (premiere issue) Thanks to Mike Baehr of Fantagraphics.

The Newspaper Archive offers a massive online database of regional papers. It claims to have archived 895 million articles published in 747 cities over 240 years. In case you’ve run out of things to read on the web, here’s a bottomless library. I bought a ten-day pass to search for Jim Flora illustrations. Easy, right? Well, yes and no. NA’s search engine uses OCR to find word strings in old newsprint that’s been erratically scanned….

Bridgeport, tempera on paper, early 1960s

Detail, Chioggia, early 1960s, acrylic

Producer/writer Bill Bernal was a dear friend of Jim Flora. In an autobiographical reminiscence penned in 1987, Flora recalled an intercession by Bernal that upscaled one of the artist’s less successful children’s books: In 1961 Leopold, the See-through Crumbpicker was published. It did not make much of a splash. It was illustrated differently than my other books and that may have been a mistake. I tried to see and do the illustrations as a child…