Filed Under: "1990s"

untitled pen and ink drawing, 1990s, possibly Mexico

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

Pencil sketch, ca. 1988-1991. Purpose unknown, but presumably an invitation to some festiveness at the Flora home. Coincidentally, the above date marks the opening reception for our Jim Flora exhibit at the Fantagraphics Bookstore/Gallery. If you’re in Seattle on that date, you’re invited! Exhibit runs thru October 24 and features original paintings, fine art prints, woodcut relief prints, record covers, music ephemera, and Little Man Press artifacts.

Detail, untitled pen and ink depicting an artist suffering from alcoholic delusions, ca. 1993-94, from sketchbook

Pen and ink, rendered two months before Flora’s death in July 1998.

Another early jazz legend revisited by Flora in his later years was New Orleans trombonist Kid Ory, composer of “Muskrat Ramble.” Among Ory’s bullet points: around 1918 he had the prescience to hire a promising teen trumpeter just starting a music career: Louis Armstrong. Here’s Flora’s classic 1947 Columbia Records 78 rpm album cover: Forty-six years later, Flora portrayed Ory shouldering a musical blowtorch: The above unpublished 1993 pen and ink rendering was actually the…

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…