Filed Under: "animals"

Detail, 1943 magazine ad for Columbia Records saxophonist Horace Heidt. First line of ad: “Did you ever see a magician pull a gnu out of an old coffee pot?” Merlin knows that the dung of the wildebeest reduces the bean’s natural acidity, resulting in a more savory brew. Just like Kopi Luwak.

Untitled, undated (ca. early 1940s) detail from sketchbook UPDATE (August 19): Discovered this draft today in a folder of early 1940s pencil and pen sketches:

Bet your moose can’t toot his own horn! Know why? Three reasons: 1) You didn’t sign him up for lessons;2) Clumsy, cloven hooves—can’t work keys; and,3) He’s not a Floramoose! Detail from December 1942 Columbia-Okeh new release monthly. Complete booklet featured in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora.

We guess that’s a three-legged dog and we suppose he’s got a bone. That could be the moon peeking through the curl of his tail. But perhaps we’re being overly literal. Detail from an untitled work ca. 1960s. Another detail appears here.

From The X-Ray Eye of Wallingford Hume, a proposed children’s book, 1943. Project abandoned, images unpublished.

That’s not what this work is titled. It has no title, and it’s a detail from a larger, possibly unpublished pen & ink mid-1950s cityscape. But it’s typically, Florifically, curiously sinister. And while alligators don’t really live in urban sewers, we have it on good authority that giant gophers burrowed the NYC subway system.

Artist Ward Jenkins reviews The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora at his Ward-O-Matic blog. Our friend Ward had previously posted about Flora’s 1957 kiddie caper, The Day The Cow Sneezed, showcasing some rarely seen draft illustrations.

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…

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…

Unpublished (and likely unexhibited) artifacts from Jim Flora sketchbooks Tempera on paper, early 1960s Pen sketch, early 1940s