Filed Under: "cutaways"

… is now open. Jim Flora hand-printed notecards, fine art bookmarks, and 2009 letterpress calendars at affordable prices. We’ve also released a number of new fine art and album cover prints over the past few weeks but haven’t had an opportunity to alert our mailing list. Here’s two, but there’s more over at JimFlora.com: Self-Portrait, ca. 1947 Gunfight on the Roof, 1951

Detail from “Ohio,” full-page illustration commissioned by Container Corporation of America, 1947. The montage (fully reproduced in The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora, page 167) originally appeared in several nationally distributed magazines, including Fortune and Time. A detail previously posted here came from a scan of the magazine tearsheet. The above detail originated from a higher-resolution color print issued in 1948 by CCA. As their name implies, CCA manufactured containers. The one pictured in cross-section…

Cover artwork (typography removed) of Sidney Bechet 78 rpm set (Columbia C-173), 1948. Flora had a particular fondness for early New Orleans jazz, especially the recordings of legendary soprano saxophonist/clarinetist Bechet (1897-1959).

When composer-arranger Bill Finegan passed away last week at the age of 91, a New York Times writer (on the recommendation of a mutual friend and Flora admirer) contacted me for some background on the music legend. I confessed that, in all honesty, I knew less about what Finegan did for Glenn Miller, Nelson Riddle, and Tommy Dorsey than I do about what Jim Flora did for Bill Finegan. Flora gave Finegan two right arms,…

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….

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.

Detail, Chioggia, early 1960s, acrylic

Spot illustration, Gup: 3 Adventures, Little Man Press, 1942

untitled tempera on paper, ca. 1960s

“Industrial Research in Europe 1955” Research & Engineering magazine, cover elementOctober-November 1955

Untitled, undated pencil drawing on onionskin paper; later printed in Gup, a 1942 chapbook authored by Robert Lowry, issued by Little Man Press (Cincinnati), featuring cover and interior illustrations by Flora.

Now, as it did in 1943 when Flora provided this illustration for a Columbia Records magazine ad:The smiley flora has antecedents: Title page, Pip Pap Po, print from woodcut, Little Man Press (Cincinnati), 1940