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We’ve compiled a Railroad Town info page at JimFlora.com, commemorating the print’s official “launch.” If you’re curious to learn more about this 1951 Flora masterwork (detail at right) which can now be purchased as a numbered, limited edition relief print, visit Railroad Town Central. Besides the new edition of 50, there are a small number of proofs available in varying ink colors and papers (info on the RRT page). The current block of five released…

Production is complete: Flora carved Railroad Town in 1951 while living in Taxco. The trial proof relief print above was produced in December 2006. The June 2007 numbered edition (of 50), just completed at Yee-Haw Industrial Letterpress in Knoxville, is even better (alas, no photo yet). Most of the “saltiness” (white flecking) visible above in the peripheries has been eliminated by printmaker Bryan Baker. The impression is solid—and stunning. The longer I stare at the…

Pen and ink, rendered two months before Flora’s death in July 1998.

In a design sense—and posthumously, anyway. Their professional paths nearly crossed: early in his career, composer-bandleader Raymond Scott recorded for Columbia Records but left the label in 1941, one year before Flora was hired by Columbia’s art department. I’ve long wanted to revive the Flora album cover tradition by adapting his art on new CDs. In 2006, Seattle’s Reptet released Do This!, whose cover was bedecked with a Flora three-eyed monster we call a “triclops.”…

A rare early 1940s relief print of a Jim Flora woodcut, printed by the artist over 60 years ago, is now being auctioned on eBay by the late artist’s family. The auction closes on May 25. The untitled, unsigned and undated work reflects Flora’s early 1940s style, when many of his paintings, sketches and commercial illustrations featured disconnected body parts and pulled-apart faces linked with pin-lines, like a Calder mobile. Flora learned woodcutting at the…

click for panoramic magnificence Flora created the woodcut RAILROAD TOWN in 1951, during his 15-month family sojourn in Mexico. It’s a manic mural, crammed with sinister figures interlocking like rune-shaped brickwork. Pictured above is a 2007 relief print, with black ink on 280g archival-quality Rives BFK cream. The block measures 11″ x 22-1/4″, and the full print (with border) measures 18-3/4″ x 30″. Working with Yee-Haw Industrial Letterpress of Knoxville, we will produce a limited…

Do you like children?, W.C. Fields was reportedly asked. “Yes, if they’re properly cooked.” Perhaps he would have enjoyed Flora’s savory recipe. From Grandpa’s Ghost Stories (Atheneum Books, 1978): Next we looked at Mrs. Ghost’s favorite program. It was about cooking and was called Feeding Phantom Faces. It opened with a big, fat-bellied demon in a tall white hat. He hauled in a big iron pot and showed us how to make soup out of…

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:

This is a print detail of Railroad Town, a 1951 Jim Flora woodcut. What you see above is approximately one-tenth of the entire 11″ x 22.5″ work. The rest is equally outrageous. Barbara and I just returned from Knoxville, where we oversaw proofs for numbered, archival-quality limited edition relief prints of this iconic Flora work. All prints are restruck from the original Flora-cut block, and the edition will be produced by Yee-Haw Industrial Letterpress. Prints…

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.

Another early jazz legend revisited by Flora in his later years was New Orleans trombonist Kid Ory, composer of “Muskrat Ramble.” Among Ory’s bullet points: around 1918 he had the prescience to hire a promising teen trumpeter just starting a music career: Louis Armstrong. Here’s Flora’s classic 1947 Columbia Records 78 rpm album cover: Forty-six years later, Flora portrayed Ory shouldering a musical blowtorch: The above unpublished 1993 pen and ink rendering was actually the…