Filed Under: "sketches"

Untitled pencil drawings for unknown project, discovered in 1960s sketchbook

Provincetown 7/57, pencil drawing from sketchbook

Another pencil draft from the 1955 sketchbook we’ve been featuring the past few weeks. The purpose of this stand-alone drawing is unknown. Other sketches on the same and adjacent pages feature rough panels for a cartoon ad about Proctor toasters; none of those drawings depict a loss of limbs.

Figures from a mid-1950s sketchbook. The two panels were juxtaposed horizontally, but are stacked here for vertical display. The purpose of the drafts is unknown, and the elements are unrelated to any other sketches in the book.

Our title, not Flora’s. Draft from sketchbook ca. 1955, purpose unknown. Adjacent pages feature rough illustrations of management skills, probably intended for a topical magazine assignment.

Flora authored and illustrated 17 children’s books under his own name between 1955 (The Fabulous Firework Family) and 1982 (Grandpa’s Witched-Up Christmas). A milk crate in the Flora archives contains contracts and correspondence for each one. Most of the letters passed between the author/artist and his legendary editress, Margaret McElderry. The crate is also stuffed with manila folders for dozens of abandoned or rejected book ideas. Walter Beartree and the Boo-Saying Whale does not have…

Untitled pencil drawing discovered in mid-1960s sketchpad. Theme unknown. The pad included dozens of rough pencil sketches for Flora’s 1964 book My Friend Charlie, along with a number of unrelated sketches, mainly architectural, some Mexico-inspired, most incomplete. This work echoes nothing else in the sketchpad, or any other known Flora work.

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

In 1956, Flora mocked up a proposed illustrated series about his fascination with Mexico. The storyboard, entitled Footloose in Mexico, consisted of vignettes drawn from his residency and travels south of the border. On the back of the heavy artist’s board draft was handwritten, “Sketches for a magazine that never got off the ground.” The identity of the failed periodical is unknown. No descriptive copy was included, just dummy lines for text placement; hence, the…

Untitled, incomplete tempera and pencil drawing, ca. 1950, found in a sketchbook from Flora’s Mexican period (1950-51). The ghostly shadows in the periphery reflect bleedthrough from an image on the reverse side of the page. No finished or refined version of this work has been found.

untitled tempera & pencil on paper found in early 1960s-era sketchbook

Henry Ford in Cetara, rough pencil drawing found in 1991 sketchpad. Cetara is in Italy. There’s no refined sketches and no indication the sketch was developed into a finished work. Flora traveled widely and artfully chronicled his globetrotting. This sketchbook contains no other images of Italy, but does contain a letter handwritten in a Mexican hospital while Flora was being treated for “over medication and loss of blood.” On the preceding page was a journal…