Jim Flora
Encyclopedia
James "Jim" Flora best known for his distinctive and idiosyncratic album cover art for RCA Victor and Columbia Records
during the 1940s and 1950s, was also a prolific commercial illustrator from the 1940s to the 1970s and the author/illustrator of 17 popular children's books. Less well-known is that he was a fine artist with a diabolical bent, who created hundreds of paintings, drawings, etchings and sketches over his 84-year lifespan.
His style evolved radically over the decades; comparing his sharp, edgy commercial work of the 1940s to his middlebrow buffoonery of the 1970s sometimes leaves the impression they were done by two different artists who happened to share the same name (he was always credited as James Flora). It seems that the more popular Flora became, the less "threatening" his art appeared. This is certainly true of his commercial work, which softened and became more generic in the 1960s and 1970s.
His private fine art, however, often served as an outlet for the artist's inner demons, as Flora dotted many works with images of violence and sexual excess. (The cover of The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora is adorned with figures from his 1940s absurdist burlesque painting, The Rape of the Stationmaster's Daughter.) Many of his smaller temperas and pen and ink sketches, particularly from the 1940s through the 1960s, featured clusters of unrelated images interlocking like rune-shaped brickwork, every square inch of surface crammed with bizarre figures, some disturbing, some nonsensical, all intriguing. As Flora once explained, "I could never stand a static space." Music was one of Flora's muses, and his montages radiate overtones of improvisation—a one-man band jamming on a canvas. His biographer, Irwin Chusid
, said that Flora "crafted rhythmic design in unfathomable meters."
He also established a reputation in the 1980s for large canvases with nautical themes, particularly ocean liners and cruise ships—the decks sometimes populated with tiny figures engaged in pornographic behavior. "When he was in his ship period," said his daughter Roussie, "he painted lots of naughty little scenes going on inside. He would have exhibitions, and the galleries would set out a basket of magnifying glasses. You would see all these old ladies clustered around the paintings trying to see what was going on in the portholes."
His early illustration style has influenced many contemporary artists, including, Derek Yaniger, Shag
(Josh Agle), Tim Biskup
, children's book author Lane Smith
("I was always inspired by the spontaneity and animation in Flora's work"), and Pixar
animator Pete Docter, along with such illustrators as J.D. King
, Michael Bartalos, J. Otto Seibold, Phillip Anderson and Terry Allen.
Despite his reputation for humorous themes and penchant for caricature, and the undeniable influence of cartoon art on his work, Flora never created comics. He was, primarily, an artist, and incidentally, a humorist. J.D. King observed, "Even in Flora's fine art, there's a feel of the Sunday funnies, the Great American Comic Strip when it was actually great. And comical."
Born in Bellefontaine, Ohio
, Flora attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati
from 1935 to 1939. In 1938, he met writer Robert Lowry
, then a student at the University of Cincinnati, and the two launched The Little Man Press, a letterpress series of limited edition publications, for which Flora supplied illustrations, design, and layout. They collaborated on Little Man Press until 1942. (Lowry, a volatile and self-destructive literary turbine, later self-published many works under a revived Little Man imprint without Flora's involvement.)
In 1941, he married his college sweetheart, artist Jane Sinnicksen. Following a brief, struggling period as a commercial artist in Cincinnati, Flora was hired at $55 a week by Columbia Records
in 1942, at which time the Floras moved to Westport, Connecticut
, since Columbia was then based in Bridgeport
. (In 1945, the couple relocated to Rowayton, Connecticut, where they lived the remainder of their lives. They had five children.)
Beginning work in the art department under Alex Steinweiss
, inventor of the illustrated album cover, Flora illustrated ads, new release bulletins, and retail and trade literature. In 1943, when Steinweiss entered the navy, Flora was promoted to Art Director
. That year, he launched Columbia's monthly new release booklet, Coda, which he continued illustrating and designing through 1945, when he was promoted to advertising manager. His replacement as art director was Robert. M. Jones, who later became art director for RCA Victor (where he twice won the Grammy Award for Best Album Cover - Classical; Flora and Jones remained lifelong friends, their careers sporadically interwining). Flora's artwork began appearing on Columbia 78 rpm album covers in 1947 (not earlier, as some accounts allege).
Flora worked as advertising manager and sales promotion manager at Columbia, but felt ill-suited for bureaucracy and grew frustrated because he was working a desk job while doing little art. Finally reaching his endurance of what he called "endless meetings, endless memos, and wrestling with budgets," Flora resigned in 1950. "Bitten by the bug of wanderlust," he drove to Mexico with his family in a Hudson sedan. They remained south of the border for 15 months, during which time Jim and Jane painted, created woodcuts and lived as bohemian gringos in Taxco.
, Holiday, Life, Look, Newsweek
, The New York Times Magazine
, Mademoiselle
, Charm, Research and Engineering, Computer Design, Sports Illustrated
, Collier's
and Pic.
From January to December, 1952, he was Art Director at Park East magazine, for which he published the first commercial illustrations by R.O. Blechman, as well as spot illustrations by the young Andy Warhol
. Flora resigned at the end of 1952, and was replaced as Art Director by Robert M. Jones, who in 1945 had replaced him as Art Director at Columbia Records.
As fate would have it, in March 1953 Jones became Art Director at RCA Victor Records, where he soon began jobbing out album cover assignments to his friend Flora. This resulted in a veritable Golden Age of Flora LP covers, including such celebrated designs as Mambo For Cats, Inside Sauter-Finegan, Lord Buckley
's Hipsters, Flipsters, and Finger-Poppin' Daddies, Knock Me Your Lobes, and Shorty Rogers Courts the Count. Around this time, Flora also did spot jobs for Columbia as a freelancer, illustrating album covers and reviving Coda during 1952 and 1953.
Among his other varied assignments in the 1950s, Flora drew a number of commercial storyboards for the pioneering animation studio, United Productions of America
(UPA), on assignment from UPA Creative Director Gene Deitch
, another lifelong friend. From September 1955 to August 1956 he served as Art Director for a short-lived technical monthly, Research & Engineering. He illustrated the cover of Computer Design magazine for 17 years (1960s and '70s), and frequent covers for American Legion magazine (1970s).
Between 1955 and 1969, working with renowned children's book editor Margaret McElderry at Harcourt Brace, Flora wrote and illustrated 11 books for young readers, including The Fabulous Firework Family (1955), The Day the Cow Sneezed (1957), Charlie Yup and His Snip-Snap Boys (1959) and Leopold, the See-Through Crumbpicker (1961).
In 1971, HB asked McElderry to take "early retirement"http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA169721.html?display=archive ("it was a real slap in the face," she later admitted). McElderry immediately received twelve job offers, and accepted a position at Atheneum Books, who gave the editor her own imprint. She quickly reconnected with and signed Flora, who between 1972 and 1982 created six more children's books for her, including Pishtosh, Bullwash, and Wimple (1972) and Stewed Goose (1973).
His wife, Jane, died in 1985. In 1987, he married Patricia Larsen.
In 1994, Flora produced a revised (redrawn and rewritten) edition of his first children's book, The Fabulous Firework Family. However, it was a pale shadow of the 1955 edition, containing none of the artistic edge and little of the rich ethnic atmosphere. Flora-seekers should not confuse the two versions, of which the original is vastly superior.
In the final years of his life, mindful of mortality, Flora continued painting and sketching at an almost frenzied rate. "Every day I do something," he told interviewer Steven Guarnaccia in 1998. "I can get here [his downstairs studio] and focus and forget every little ache and pain that I have." A few months later, Flora died in Rowayton, Connecticut
from stomach cancer.
A few years after his death, his long-neglected paintings and private fine artworks began achieving notoriety, thanks to the research and cataloging of Irwin Chusid
and Barbara Economon, who have compiled two anthologies of Flora's rarely seen works, both published by Fantagraphics Books
. The team plans to compile at least two more such books, as the Flora family archive contains hundreds of fascinating paintings, sketches and long-unseen commercial assignments.
Vintage Flora images have appeared on new CD covers: Reptet's release Do This! (2006, Monktail Records) used an early 1950s Flora "triclops" figure; Whirled Chamber Music (2007, ViolinJazz Recordings) by the twice Grammy-nominated Quartet San Francisco
features a detail from a 1960s Flora painting entitled Barberinni; and the album Ectoplasm (2008, Basta Audio-Visuals), a collection of late 1940s recordings by the Raymond Scott
Quintet, features a 1951 Flora illustration.
Many artists have been influenced by Flora's work, others have parodied his style. One of Flora's album covers, the 1955 RCA Victor release This is Benny Goodman and his Orchestra, was parodied twice: on a 1998 Pearl Jam
tour poster and on the cover art for the 2000 CD Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas by the theremin
band The Lothars. The cover of the 2003 CD Conviction by slam poet Taylor Mali
parodied Flora's 1947 cover art for Gene Krupa and His Orchestra.
His second children's book, The Day the Cow Sneezed, will be reprinted by Enchanted Lion Books in Fall 2010.
Columbia Records
Columbia Records is an American record label, owned by Japan's Sony Music Entertainment, operating under the Columbia Music Group with Aware Records. It was founded in 1888, evolving from an earlier enterprise, the American Graphophone Company — successor to the Volta Graphophone Company...
during the 1940s and 1950s, was also a prolific commercial illustrator from the 1940s to the 1970s and the author/illustrator of 17 popular children's books. Less well-known is that he was a fine artist with a diabolical bent, who created hundreds of paintings, drawings, etchings and sketches over his 84-year lifespan.
Evolving styles
Flora had a cartoonish style that, in its earliest (1940s and 1950s) incarnations, betrayed a diabolic humor and uninhibited sense of outrageousness. Despite a later reputation for "cuddly" kiddie lit and family-friendly illustrations for mainstream magazines, Flora's fine art—both early and late—was by turns bizarre, playful, comic, erotic and/or macabre. It could, on occasion, shock or offend.His style evolved radically over the decades; comparing his sharp, edgy commercial work of the 1940s to his middlebrow buffoonery of the 1970s sometimes leaves the impression they were done by two different artists who happened to share the same name (he was always credited as James Flora). It seems that the more popular Flora became, the less "threatening" his art appeared. This is certainly true of his commercial work, which softened and became more generic in the 1960s and 1970s.
His private fine art, however, often served as an outlet for the artist's inner demons, as Flora dotted many works with images of violence and sexual excess. (The cover of The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora is adorned with figures from his 1940s absurdist burlesque painting, The Rape of the Stationmaster's Daughter.) Many of his smaller temperas and pen and ink sketches, particularly from the 1940s through the 1960s, featured clusters of unrelated images interlocking like rune-shaped brickwork, every square inch of surface crammed with bizarre figures, some disturbing, some nonsensical, all intriguing. As Flora once explained, "I could never stand a static space." Music was one of Flora's muses, and his montages radiate overtones of improvisation—a one-man band jamming on a canvas. His biographer, Irwin Chusid
Irwin Chusid
Irwin Chusid is a journalist, music historian, radio personality and self-described "landmark preservationist." His stated mission has been to "find things on the scrapheap of history that I know don't belong there and salvage them." Those "things" have included such previously overlooked but...
, said that Flora "crafted rhythmic design in unfathomable meters."
He also established a reputation in the 1980s for large canvases with nautical themes, particularly ocean liners and cruise ships—the decks sometimes populated with tiny figures engaged in pornographic behavior. "When he was in his ship period," said his daughter Roussie, "he painted lots of naughty little scenes going on inside. He would have exhibitions, and the galleries would set out a basket of magnifying glasses. You would see all these old ladies clustered around the paintings trying to see what was going on in the portholes."
His early illustration style has influenced many contemporary artists, including, Derek Yaniger, Shag
SHAG (Josh Agle)
Josh Agle is an American artist, better known by the nickname SHAG.-Life:Agle's nickname is derived from the last two letters of his first name, and the first two letters of his last name...
(Josh Agle), Tim Biskup
Tim Biskup
Tim Biskup is an American artist generally considered to be a part of the group that has been dubbed "lowbrow" or pop surrealism...
, children's book author Lane Smith
Lane Smith (illustrator)
Lane Smith is an American children's book author and illustrator.-Background:Smith was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but moved to Corona, California at a young age...
("I was always inspired by the spontaneity and animation in Flora's work"), and Pixar
Pixar
Pixar Animation Studios, pronounced , is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California. The studio has earned 26 Academy Awards, seven Golden Globes, and three Grammy Awards, among many other awards and acknowledgments. Its films have made over $6.3 billion worldwide...
animator Pete Docter, along with such illustrators as J.D. King
J.D. King
J.D. King is an American artist best known for his commercial art illustrations for companies including Absolut Vodka, Atlantic Records, Condé Nast Publications, Sony, and others.-Biography:J.D...
, Michael Bartalos, J. Otto Seibold, Phillip Anderson and Terry Allen.
Despite his reputation for humorous themes and penchant for caricature, and the undeniable influence of cartoon art on his work, Flora never created comics. He was, primarily, an artist, and incidentally, a humorist. J.D. King observed, "Even in Flora's fine art, there's a feel of the Sunday funnies, the Great American Comic Strip when it was actually great. And comical."
Life and early career
Bellefontaine, Ohio
Bellefontaine is a city in and the county seat of Logan County, Ohio, United States. The population was 13,069 at the 2000 census. It is the center of the Bellefontaine Micropolitan Statistical Area, as defined by the United States Census Bureau in 2003...
, Flora attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati
Art Academy of Cincinnati
The Art Academy of Cincinnati is a private college of art and design, accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, in Cincinnati, Ohio...
from 1935 to 1939. In 1938, he met writer Robert Lowry
Robert Lowry (writer)
Robert James Collas Lowry was an American novelist, short story writer, illustrator, and independent press publisher....
, then a student at the University of Cincinnati, and the two launched The Little Man Press, a letterpress series of limited edition publications, for which Flora supplied illustrations, design, and layout. They collaborated on Little Man Press until 1942. (Lowry, a volatile and self-destructive literary turbine, later self-published many works under a revived Little Man imprint without Flora's involvement.)
In 1941, he married his college sweetheart, artist Jane Sinnicksen. Following a brief, struggling period as a commercial artist in Cincinnati, Flora was hired at $55 a week by Columbia Records
Columbia Records
Columbia Records is an American record label, owned by Japan's Sony Music Entertainment, operating under the Columbia Music Group with Aware Records. It was founded in 1888, evolving from an earlier enterprise, the American Graphophone Company — successor to the Volta Graphophone Company...
in 1942, at which time the Floras moved to Westport, Connecticut
Westport, Connecticut
-Neighborhoods:* Saugatuck – around the Westport railroad station near the southwestern corner of the town – a built-up area with some restaurants, stores and offices....
, since Columbia was then based in Bridgeport
Bridgeport
Bridgeport is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Connecticut.Bridgeport may also refer to:-Places:In Canada:* Bridgeport, Nova ScotiaIn the United States:* Bridgeport, Alabama* Bridgeport, California, in Mono County...
. (In 1945, the couple relocated to Rowayton, Connecticut, where they lived the remainder of their lives. They had five children.)
Beginning work in the art department under Alex Steinweiss
Alex Steinweiss
Alexander "Alex" Steinweiss was a graphic designer known for inventing the album cover.-Early life:Alex Steinweiss was born on March 24, 1917, in Brooklyn. His father was a women's shoe designer from Warsaw and his mother was a seamstress from Riga, Latvia...
, inventor of the illustrated album cover, Flora illustrated ads, new release bulletins, and retail and trade literature. In 1943, when Steinweiss entered the navy, Flora was promoted to Art Director
Art director
The art director is a person who supervise the creative process of a design.The term 'art director' is a blanket title for a variety of similar job functions in advertising, publishing, film and television, the Internet, and video games....
. That year, he launched Columbia's monthly new release booklet, Coda, which he continued illustrating and designing through 1945, when he was promoted to advertising manager. His replacement as art director was Robert. M. Jones, who later became art director for RCA Victor (where he twice won the Grammy Award for Best Album Cover - Classical; Flora and Jones remained lifelong friends, their careers sporadically interwining). Flora's artwork began appearing on Columbia 78 rpm album covers in 1947 (not earlier, as some accounts allege).
Flora worked as advertising manager and sales promotion manager at Columbia, but felt ill-suited for bureaucracy and grew frustrated because he was working a desk job while doing little art. Finally reaching his endurance of what he called "endless meetings, endless memos, and wrestling with budgets," Flora resigned in 1950. "Bitten by the bug of wanderlust," he drove to Mexico with his family in a Hudson sedan. They remained south of the border for 15 months, during which time Jim and Jane painted, created woodcuts and lived as bohemian gringos in Taxco.
Commercial art and books
The couple returned to Connecticut in 1951, and Flora then embarked on a freelance commercial art career in which he would thrive for decades. He illustrated covers and interior articles for dozens of mainstream magazines, FortuneFortune (magazine)
Fortune is a global business magazine published by Time Inc. Founded by Henry Luce in 1930, the publishing business, consisting of Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, grew to become Time Warner. In turn, AOL grew as it acquired Time Warner in 2000 when Time Warner was the world's largest...
, Holiday, Life, Look, Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
, The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine is a Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It is host to feature articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors...
, Mademoiselle
Mademoiselle (magazine)
Mademoiselle was an influential women's magazine first published in 1935 by Street and Smith and later acquired by Condé Nast Publications....
, Charm, Research and Engineering, Computer Design, Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated is an American sports media company owned by media conglomerate Time Warner. Its self titled magazine has over 3.5 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the...
, Collier's
Collier's Weekly
Collier's Weekly was an American magazine founded by Peter Fenelon Collier and published from 1888 to 1957. With the passage of decades, the title was shortened to Collier's....
and Pic.
From January to December, 1952, he was Art Director at Park East magazine, for which he published the first commercial illustrations by R.O. Blechman, as well as spot illustrations by the young Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
. Flora resigned at the end of 1952, and was replaced as Art Director by Robert M. Jones, who in 1945 had replaced him as Art Director at Columbia Records.
As fate would have it, in March 1953 Jones became Art Director at RCA Victor Records, where he soon began jobbing out album cover assignments to his friend Flora. This resulted in a veritable Golden Age of Flora LP covers, including such celebrated designs as Mambo For Cats, Inside Sauter-Finegan, Lord Buckley
Lord Buckley
Lord Richard Buckley was an American stage performer, recording artist, monologist, and hip poet/comic...
's Hipsters, Flipsters, and Finger-Poppin' Daddies, Knock Me Your Lobes, and Shorty Rogers Courts the Count. Around this time, Flora also did spot jobs for Columbia as a freelancer, illustrating album covers and reviving Coda during 1952 and 1953.
Among his other varied assignments in the 1950s, Flora drew a number of commercial storyboards for the pioneering animation studio, United Productions of America
United Productions of America
United Productions of America, better known as UPA, was an American animation studio of the 1940s through present day, beginning with industrial films and World War II training films. In the late 1940s, UPA produced theatrical shorts for Columbia Pictures, most notably the Mr. Magoo series. In...
(UPA), on assignment from UPA Creative Director Gene Deitch
Gene Deitch
Eugene Merril "Gene" Deitch is an American illustrator, animator and film director. He has been based in Prague, capital of Czechoslovakia and the present-day Czech Republic, since 1959. Since 1968, Deitch has been the leading animation director for the Connecticut organization Weston...
, another lifelong friend. From September 1955 to August 1956 he served as Art Director for a short-lived technical monthly, Research & Engineering. He illustrated the cover of Computer Design magazine for 17 years (1960s and '70s), and frequent covers for American Legion magazine (1970s).
Between 1955 and 1969, working with renowned children's book editor Margaret McElderry at Harcourt Brace, Flora wrote and illustrated 11 books for young readers, including The Fabulous Firework Family (1955), The Day the Cow Sneezed (1957), Charlie Yup and His Snip-Snap Boys (1959) and Leopold, the See-Through Crumbpicker (1961).
In 1971, HB asked McElderry to take "early retirement"http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA169721.html?display=archive ("it was a real slap in the face," she later admitted). McElderry immediately received twelve job offers, and accepted a position at Atheneum Books, who gave the editor her own imprint. She quickly reconnected with and signed Flora, who between 1972 and 1982 created six more children's books for her, including Pishtosh, Bullwash, and Wimple (1972) and Stewed Goose (1973).
Later life
After he retired from commercial work in the late 1970s, Flora devoted the remainder of his artistic life to painting and sketching. His nautical canvases were occasionally exhibited, and he marketed posters of some of his large-scale ship-related works.His wife, Jane, died in 1985. In 1987, he married Patricia Larsen.
In 1994, Flora produced a revised (redrawn and rewritten) edition of his first children's book, The Fabulous Firework Family. However, it was a pale shadow of the 1955 edition, containing none of the artistic edge and little of the rich ethnic atmosphere. Flora-seekers should not confuse the two versions, of which the original is vastly superior.
In the final years of his life, mindful of mortality, Flora continued painting and sketching at an almost frenzied rate. "Every day I do something," he told interviewer Steven Guarnaccia in 1998. "I can get here [his downstairs studio] and focus and forget every little ache and pain that I have." A few months later, Flora died in Rowayton, Connecticut
Rowayton, Connecticut
Rowayton is a section of Norwalk, Connecticut. Located on the Long Island Sound just 45 miles from New York City, Rowayton is a coastal New England village...
from stomach cancer.
A few years after his death, his long-neglected paintings and private fine artworks began achieving notoriety, thanks to the research and cataloging of Irwin Chusid
Irwin Chusid
Irwin Chusid is a journalist, music historian, radio personality and self-described "landmark preservationist." His stated mission has been to "find things on the scrapheap of history that I know don't belong there and salvage them." Those "things" have included such previously overlooked but...
and Barbara Economon, who have compiled two anthologies of Flora's rarely seen works, both published by Fantagraphics Books
Fantagraphics Books
Fantagraphics Books is an American publisher of alternative comics, classic comic strip anthologies, magazines, graphic novels, and the adult-oriented Eros Comix imprint...
. The team plans to compile at least two more such books, as the Flora family archive contains hundreds of fascinating paintings, sketches and long-unseen commercial assignments.
Vintage Flora images have appeared on new CD covers: Reptet's release Do This! (2006, Monktail Records) used an early 1950s Flora "triclops" figure; Whirled Chamber Music (2007, ViolinJazz Recordings) by the twice Grammy-nominated Quartet San Francisco
Quartet San Francisco
Quartet San Francisco is a non-traditional and eclectic string quartet led by violinist Jeremy Cohen. The group played their first concert in 2001 and has recorded four albums...
features a detail from a 1960s Flora painting entitled Barberinni; and the album Ectoplasm (2008, Basta Audio-Visuals), a collection of late 1940s recordings by the Raymond Scott
Raymond Scott
Raymond Scott was an American composer, band leader, pianist, engineer, recording studio maverick, and electronic instrument inventor....
Quintet, features a 1951 Flora illustration.
Many artists have been influenced by Flora's work, others have parodied his style. One of Flora's album covers, the 1955 RCA Victor release This is Benny Goodman and his Orchestra, was parodied twice: on a 1998 Pearl Jam
Pearl Jam
Pearl Jam is an American rock band that formed in Seattle, Washington, in 1990. Since its inception, the band's line-up has included Eddie Vedder , Jeff Ament , Stone Gossard , and Mike McCready...
tour poster and on the cover art for the 2000 CD Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas by the theremin
Theremin
The theremin , originally known as the aetherphone/etherophone, thereminophone or termenvox/thereminvox is an early electronic musical instrument controlled without discernible physical contact from the player. It is named after its Russian inventor, Professor Léon Theremin, who patented the device...
band The Lothars. The cover of the 2003 CD Conviction by slam poet Taylor Mali
Taylor Mali
Taylor Mali is an American slam poet, humorist, teacher, and voiceover artist.-Life:A 10th-generation native of New York City, Taylor Mali graduated from the Collegiate School, a private school for boys, in 1983. He received a B.A. in English from Bowdoin College in 1987 and an M.A. in...
parodied Flora's 1947 cover art for Gene Krupa and His Orchestra.
His second children's book, The Day the Cow Sneezed, will be reprinted by Enchanted Lion Books in Fall 2010.
External links
- Jim Flora official website
- Jim Flora discography of album illustrations
- Jim Flora Art (family) gallery
- Jim Flora blog maintained by Flora biographers/archivists Irwin Chusid and Barbara Economon
- AIGA interview with Irwin Chusid about the Flora archives
- James Flora marine art
- The Day the Cow Sneezed - Images and rare mock-ups of Flora's second children's book
- New York Times article about Jim Flora from 2004: "Album Art of Cartoon Wit, Raptor Energy"
- Interview with James Flora by Angelynn Grant, 1990, discussing his album cover art
- The Fabulous Floras, article, New Canaan and Darien (CT) Magazine, November 2006