Filed Under: "sketches"

pen & ink with pencil outline, detail, sketchbook,ca. 1950-51, when Flora was living in Mexico Here’s an undated forebear: Distant relative, from a 1948 Columbia Records ad(fully reproduced in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora)

business card, Davis Delaney Printing (ca. 1950s) adapted pencil and tempera figures from sketchbook

Untitled pen sketch, ca. early-1940s. This image was later adapted (along with more than a dozen seemingly unrelated sketch works) in a 1943 copper-engraved montage entitled Air of Panic. The white vertical skunk stripe is an artifact likely caused by long-term exposure to light; the white area was shielded from exposure while the rest of the paper became yellowed with age.

Sketchbook untitled elements, with glue residueca. 1941-43

Pencil sketches for Till Eulenspiegel LP cover, 1955. The above skeletal figures eventually morphed into this rough layout: … which was refined as this unfinished tempera setting: … which evolved into this finished RCA Victor Red Seal cover: Till Eulenspiegel was an impudent prankster in German folklore. Flora rendered several pen and ink drawings of the trickster in the 1990s. Perhaps he recognized a kindred spirit.

unidentified sketchbook scene, early 1950s

Pen drawing on onionskin paper with glue residue, early 1940s, from scrapbook. This freakish apparition has been blessed by the artist with bonus arms that appear to be appendages of his head, which has a stem on which to balance a coat hanger.

Untitled pen drawing on onionskin paper, early 1940s, from scrapbook. Brownish residue caused by glue applied by the artist, who is also responsible for the irregular trim. There are hundreds of such miniatures in the collection.

Draft illustration, The Day the Cow Sneezed (1957)Flora’s second children’s bookThat goat gets around.

Top section of untitled three-tiered tempera and pencil, from sketchbook, ca. early 1950s. The two lower tiers, using the same color palette, are no less comically inscrutable.

Not quite hot on the heels of The Mischievous Art and The Curiously Sinister Art, Barbara and I are now compiling a third volume of Floriana. Tentatively titled The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora, the book will be published by Fantagraphics in July or August 2009. Designer Laura Lindgren will once again transform our loosely organized text and Flora’s genial monstrosities into a tight, 180-page coffeetable bouquet. Over the next year, this blog will…

early 1940s pencil sketch adapted forRobert Lowry short story “The Monkey Cane,”appearing in Gup (Little Man Press, 1942)