Filed Under: "details"

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.

New York Times Magazine, October 1, 1967

I’ve hosted a radio program at WFMU since 1975. Thirty-two punch-drunk years. WFMU is a non-commercial, Free-Form station—one of the charter FF outlets, being entertainingly anarchic since 1968. We play anything—popular/obscure, new/old, good/bad; the tasteful juxtaposed with the creepy. We’re an aural curio shop, and “Genre” is a poltergeist who got discouraged and went a-haunting elsewhere. A typical WFMU program sounds like an overactive iPod shuffle. The station has a four-decade reputation and retains an…

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 Project abandoned, images unpublished.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 It has no title, and it’s a detail from a larger, possibly unpublished pen & ink mid-1950s cityscape.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…

A portion of an illustration for Park East magazine (June 1952).

Choo-choo, woo-woo! Another small segment from a larger work (also featured in its entirety in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora). No date attributed to this work, nor is it titled, but its whistle has a familiar refrain. Jim Flora’s affinity for the railroad yard and its denizens dates back to the mid-1930s when he returned to his home state of Ohio after exploring a brief scholarship granted to him by the Boston Architectural…

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…