Filed Under: "monsters"

Detail from panoramic illustration for article “Arts and the Man,” Park East magazine, May 1953. Flora served as the publication’s art director in 1952, but moved on to full-time freelancing in January 1953. His successor in the Park East AD chair was his longtime colleague Robert M. Jones, who had also succeeded Flora as AD at Columbia Records in 1945. Jones jobbed out several Park East illustration assignments to Flora. The following year, Jones was…

Keystone Crowd, a 1968 tempera on thick stock that hasn’t yet made it into one of our Flora anthologies. Unpublished, uncirculated, previously unseen work currently sitting in storage. Pennsylvania is the Keystone State, but the artist’s title reference remains a mystery.

Today in 1914, James Royer Flora was born in Bellefontaine, Ohio. Above our guy is pictured relaxing at home in the late 1980s. Interesting juxtaposition of bold patterns, with hunting jacket, slacks and chair vying for focal primacy. Cameo in the upper right by the Fab Four, depicted in 1964, tho it appears to be a hand-rendered (probably not by Flora) replica of a famous photo. Flora’s daughter Julia provides some family context: I love…

Baba Yaga, pen & ink and oil pastel on paper, 14″ x 16″, 1996. Previously unpublished and uncirculated late life work (two years before the artist’s death). Wiki entry profiles a dangerous damsel: She flies around on a giant pestle or broomstick, kidnaps (and presumably eats) small children, and lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs.

Untitled pencil sketch, mid-1960s, discovered in artist’s sketchbook. No indication the draft was refined for any specific use.

Untitled tempera on board, 1964, reproduced in our second book, The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora (Fantagraphics, 2007). Though ten years separate the works, certain elements are reminiscent of the 1954 RCA Victor LP Shorty Rogers Courts the Count.

Unfinished pencil and tempera sketch, ca. 1950-51 (Flora’s Mexican sojourn), found in artist’s notebook. There’s no evidence the work was refined or adapted for any other purpose. The ghost image in the background is the bleedthrough of a series of figures on the reverse. The left figure above has some female attributes, the right some vague echoes of manhood. Regarding the lady, we won’t speculate on what’s protruding from her butt or clustered in her…

Yesterday we (officially) launched our latest limited edition screen print series, Mardi Gras Quartet. (They’ve been “unofficially” available on our website for months.) Based on an early 1950s series painted by Flora while living in Mexico, each print is identical except for color scheme. The original four variants, along with sketches and figure studies (displayed at the bottom of the linked print page), were reproduced in our second book, The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim…

Some people dedicate their bodies to science. Shannon Wade, of Portland OR, dedicates hers to the art of Jim Flora. Not the first time, either. The above distended figure originally appeared on the title page of GUP, a 1942 Little Man Press publication written by Robert Lowry and illustrated by Flora.

New launch: a miniature (7″ x 8″) giclée open edition print (at $25/ea.) of a previously unpublished and uncirculated mid-1990s Flora pen & ink drawing. Celebrities portrays anonymous showbiz figures as freakshow caricatures. This is our second open edition, low-cost fine art print; Mambo For Cats was launched last October.

Acrylic on canvas (20″ x 16″), mid-1990s, one of countless unpublished and previously uncirculated (and mischievous and unfathomable) late-life works in the Flora archives.

Quadruped of indeterminate zoological origin; detail, Where Will It All End?, tempera on paper (1993). The full work, previously unpublished, was reproduced in The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora (page 66). The rest of the painting is no less disconcerting. Flora was 79 at the time. Many of his 1990s works betray a wobbly hand. Bold ideas continued to flow from the artist’s hallucinatory imagination, but the brushwork was less meticulous than in previous…