Filed Under: "trains"

Spot illustration, Gup: 3 Adventures, Little Man Press, 1942

Detail from The Rape of the Stationmaster’s Daughter, an undated early 1940s tempera on paper. Elements of this work were adapted by designer Laura Lindgren for the cover of The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora, and the complete painting was featured in the book. On the production schedule for March 2008: the fine art print.

Detail, Joel Flora birth announcement, July 1947Image courtesy Richard Loffer

Along with beasties, boppers and boats, trains were a perennial Flora motif. During the Great Depression he defrayed his tuition costs for the Art Academy of Cincinnati by working the moon-tan shift at a railyard. His uncle Charlie Royer (sketched below in the early 1990s, some sixty years later) was an engineer. Flora wrote in 1988: My uncle John Royer was night foreman of the Cincinnati Railroad Terminal Roundhouse. He was able to get me…

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…