Filed Under: "Art Academy of Cincinnati"

“Oldtown,” pen and ink drawing, late 1930s, unpublished work. Oldtown (or Old Town?) is presumably a neighborhood in Cincinnati, where Flora lived at the time he rendered this drawing. We were unable to locate this community in a rudimentary search on our Google Machine. If any locals have the answer, please leave a comment below. 

We don’t generally post the work of other artists on the Flora blog, but we’re delighted to make an exception with Clara Gee Stamaty. Clara met Flora when they attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati in the early 1940s. Her late husband, syndicated cartoonist Stanley Stamaty (d. 1979), was one of Flora’s best buddies at school, and the couple remained lifelong friends with Flora. (Clara remarried in 1984.) To celebrate becoming a nonagenarian, Clara has…

The Rover Boys, tempera on board, ca. 1943. The work was presented as a wedding gift to Clara Gee Kastner and Stanley Stamaty, Flora’s classmates and friends from the Art Academy of Cincinnati. (Clara and Stan are the parents of cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty.) No idea if the triple-headed figure was intended to portray the Rover lads of literary fame. The work was reproduced in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora A pen and…

Robert Lowry (1919-1994) would turn 90 today. Don’t expect a presidential proclamation in commemoration of this troubled man’s legacy. However, we salute the Little Man Press writer/editor for changing the course of Flora’s career, and probably for influencing his art. It all began one day in 1938 when the volatile literary turbine accosted Flora on the Art Academy of Cincinnati campus and demanded the undergrad illustrator serve as art director for his fledgling independent press…

Mount Adams Winter Scene (1937) was painted by Flora while studying at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and is the only existing color work from his academy days. It may, in fact, be the earliest existing Flora work—period. (There are undated student-era sketches.) The style, of course, does not reflect Flora’s future direction. At the academy he was training to be a fine artist, and such were his aspirations. It’s ironic that in the depths…