Filed Under: "animals"

Sketchbook untitled elements, with glue residueca. 1941-43

Draft overlay, The Day the Cow Sneezed, 1957, found amid the James Flora Papers in the Dr. Irvin J. Kerlan Collection, University of Minnesota. Who was Dr. Kerlan?

Pencil sketches for Till Eulenspiegel LP cover, 1955. The above skeletal figures eventually morphed into this rough layout: … which was refined as this unfinished tempera setting: … which evolved into this finished RCA Victor Red Seal cover: Till Eulenspiegel was an impudent prankster in German folklore. Flora rendered several pen and ink drawings of the trickster in the 1990s. Perhaps he recognized a kindred spirit.

Commercial illustration, late 1950s, publication unknown. Tempera mechanical found in the Flora archives. The illustration’s theme has contemporary resonance in the wake of the subprime meltdown.

Untitled tempera illustration for unknown magazine, March 1958. Stamped on reverse: “kill” — which doesn’t refer to the dragon or the knight-in-a-necktie. It refers to the drawing, which was rejected for unknown reasons. An earlier throwdown:

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…

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…

Draft illustration, The Day the Cow Sneezed (1957)Flora’s second children’s bookThat goat gets around.

Pen and ink, 1998. One of several works by Flora with this title, in various media, rendered in the final years of his life. On this date ten years ago, James Flora passed away at age 84. Nine days later the New York Times published an obit by Steven Heller. I posted a tribute at the WFMU blog, citing Flora’s posthumous contributions to the station’s visual identity.

Jim Flora Art LLC has released a limited edition fine art print of an uncirculated Flora pen & ink drawing from the mid-1990s entitled Sunday Morning. This is the latest-life work by the artist we have offered in a numbered edition. Two prints are now listed on eBay at a launch price, after which subsequent prints will be offered at increasing prices as edition depletes. Update: Launch prints have been sold. Edition now available at…

It’s been a long time comin’ here in Minnesota — at last I can milk the cow, play some records and mow the lawn! Ah, yes — but it still drizzles. Hence the umbrella. And cigar. Saturday Evening Post advertising promotional booklet, 1955.

Look magazine, December 27, 1955