American illustrator, artist and graphic designer Jim Flora was Born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, in 1914
and he studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati from 1935 to 1939.
While there in 1938 he met the writer Robert Lowry, who was at the university,
and together they launched the Little Man Press.
And through this partnership they published a small number of esoteric limited edition books
for which Flora supplied illustrations and design.
His stylistic influences were many and unconventional,
but primarily drawn from his interest in Mexican folk art
and the angular abstracted art of early 20th century artists including Paul Klee and Joan Miro.
His association with Robert Lowry ended in 1942
when Flora was hired to work in the art department of Columbia Records, and he and his
wife moved to Westport, Connecticut to be within commuting distance of the company's offices.
At Columbia he worked under the supervision of studio head Alex Steinweiss,
who had designed the first ever illustrated record album cover a couple of years earlier.
But Flora was put to work initially not on record covers but on advertising material
and trade literature in a role which entailed as much design and management as it did illustration.
In 1943 Steinweiss joined the navy to fight in the war,
and in his absence Flora was promoted to Art Director.
And it was in that year that Flora launched Columbia's monthly new release booklet, Coda,
which he continued to design and illustrate up to 1945,
when he was promoted to the role of advertising manager.
Although this position was even more senior and suitably well paid it entailed more
administration than creative work and he grew increasingly frustrated by his managerial role.
At this time he was attempting to satisfy his creative urges by producing editorial
illustrations for Fortune magazine, and press advertising for other clients on a freelance basis
In 1947 he finally got to create a couple of record cover illustrations for Columbia,
but by this point it was a case of too little too late and in 1950 he resigned from his job.
He rather impulsively drove with his wife to the town of Taxco,
southwest of Mexico City, where they lived a bohemian lifestyle for the next year,
and he created woodcut prints which displayed a clear influence of Mexican folk art.
The couple returned to Connecticut in 1951, and he began to generate
illustration work on a more regular basis for Fortune, and he widened his client
base with other well regarded magazines including Life, Newsweek, and Collier's.
These images were radically different from what was considered usual in magazine illustration
for the time, and although he wasn't the only illustrator in 1950s America to reject
representational image making he was certainly one of the most extreme and successful examples.
In 1952 he took another full time job as the Art Director at Park East magazine, but once again he
found this employment creatively stifling, and within a year he was back to working freelance.
In 1953 Flora started to get commissions from RCA Victor records for their large catalogue of
mostly modern jazz album covers, although there were also some classical music covers produced,
and it was with this series of commissions that he most firmly established a visual
identity with no real precedent in American commercial illustration.
This wildly imaginative collection brought together all his earlier influences
in a collision of surreal, and frequently manic image making,
using colour and form purely for aesthetic purposes.
Despite the predominantly cut-out look of many of his graphic images at this time
Flora's choice of medium for his work was almost certainly tempera paint. I base this on the fact
that virtually all his painted art was created that way, so i think it's a reasonable assumption.
Even when creating these graphic masterpieces he was simultaneously freelancing for his
old employers Columbia, finally producing a steady stream of covers for their performers,
and for a couple of years he worked once again on the design and illustration of Coda.
In 1955 he took yet another full-time job as Art Director for a short-lived technical monthly,
Research & Engineering, and unsurprisingly he was freelance again before the year was over.
Most significantly it was in that year that Flora's first book for children was published.
This was The Fabulous Firework Family, and his flat cutout style and use of non-naturalistic
colour made a significant impact. In this book, and the many that followed,
he held in check the wilder and occasionally grotesque extremes of his record cover work,
and followed the more broadly appealing methods of his magazine illustration.
At around the same time he had been working as a storyboard artist for the animation studios UPA,
the creators of characters such as Mister Magoo.
And in 1959 the studio made an animated short of Flora's first book.
Sadly the quality of the film isn't good enough to include here,
and it wasn't a particularly successful translation of the book's visual content.
There is some physical evdence that he was also trying other ideas,
some of which never saw the light of day.
But he followed the success of The Firework Family withThe Day the Cow Sneezed in 1957,
and this book took even greater liberties with accepted wisdom about what appealed to children.
The story was outrageously surreal and the images
perfectly mirrored and enhanced the insanity of the narrative.
And from this point on most of Flora's formidable creative
energy was devoted to producing wildly imaginative picture books for children.
His next success was another absurdist tale Charlie Yup and His Snip-Snap Boys, which was
published in 1959, and the equally offbeat Leopold the See-Through Crumbpicker followed in 1961.
And by this point Flora had become one of the most
popular illustrators and authors of books for children in America.
1962's Kangaroo for Christmas was firmly in the by now expected Flora abstracted brightly coloured
style, but there followed a shift away from more radical styling in the books that followed.
By 1964, when My Friend Charlie was published
there were signs that his image-making was becoming more organic and loosely
drawn than previously, although still far from representational.
By now his record cover work had all but ceased, and although the picture books continued to
dominate his output he was still producing engaging and eloquent editorial illustration
for various magazines, including Fortune. And the images he created
continued to demonstrate his visual wit and powerful aesthetic appeal into the 1960s.
But if his illustration work was by now more accessible this stylistic shift had
no visible impact on his work as an artist. His prints and paintings continued to be enigmatic
with touches of dark surreal humour and by this point he had developed a strong
reputation and his relentlessly abstracted work was considered highly collectible.
His book Grandpa's Farm was published in 1965,
and its popular success led to other grandpa themed stories in later years. Like many others
that followed it featured a limited flat colour palette, and although I have no proof it looks
very much as though the colours were now being applied at print onto his line work.
But this must surely have been a creative rather than a financially motivated decision,
given the commercial success the books enjoyed.
This was followed in 1966 by Sherwood Walks Home,
an engaging tale of a bear and his travelling companions, and Flora produced several others,
all of which enjoyed popular success in the years that followed.
Flora began an association with a new publisher in 1972 and between that year and 1982 he created
another 6 children's books. The first of these was Pishtosh, Bullwash, and Wimple in 1972,
and amongother highlights was the particularly popular Grandpa's Ghost Stories, teaturing an
array of comically horrific characters rendered with an exclusively black and blue palette.
The last of this sesies was 1982's Grandpa's Witched-up Christmas,
and from this point onward he devoted himself entirely to painting and prints.
His nautical canvases were occasionally exhibited, and he marketed posters of some
of his large-scale ship-related works, some of which were unexpectedly tonal paintings.
His wife, Jane, died in 1985, but two years later at the age of 73 he married for the second time.
Although he had stopped creating picture books in 1994 Flora published a redrawn and rewritten
edition of his first children's book, The Fabulous Firework Family, and it would also be his last.
Old age eventually got the better of him in 1998
and Jim Flora died in Rowayton, Connecticut at the age of 84.
As I conclude this video its about 80 years since Jim Flora was first published
and just over 20 since his death.
And the vast amount of innovative and frequently challenging work he created in his lifetime
has already proven to be a legacy of clear stylistic influence on many
contemporary illustrators, working in a style currently known somewhat carelessly as Retro.
And looking through Flora's remarkable collected works,
and the abstracted liberties he frequently took I find myself
wondering how many of those illustrators even know who they owe their careers to.