|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||||
|
The Mischevious Art of Jim Flora |
His
artwork my have adorned jazz LP covers in the 1940s, but there was
nothing square about the syncopated design of Jim Flora: a man who
has had a profound influence on a host of contemporary illustrators |
I wish I could claim that I first discovered
Jim Flora’s unrestrained angular illustration quite by chance:
that whilst digging through a stack of old vinyl at a boot sale early
one sunny morn’, sandwiched between albums by Peters and Lee
and Aker Bilk, I came across something called ‘Redskin Romp’
by Charlie Barnet and his Orchestra and fell immediately in love with
the cover — caring not a jot about the vinyl inside. And that
after my epiphany I made it my mission to track down more artwork
by the man whose signature appeared on the sleeve in tiny letters
close by the foot of a trumpet-totin’ injun. For that’s
kind of how it happened for the likes of Shag, Tim Biskup and the
graphic designer Melinda Beck. However, I have to confess that I originally
saw the work of Jim Flora in the pages of a book called ‘In
the Groove: Vintage Record Graphics 1940–1960’ by Eric
Kohler.  The fairly recently deceased Flora remains an obscure figure. Hopefully, though, a new book, ‘The Mischevious Art of Jim Flora’ will go some way to introducing Flora’s ‘syncopated designs’ to a wider public. It paints a picture of a warm-spirited, cat-loving, jazz-afficionado who was both surprised and flattered to have been rediscovered by a new generation so late in his life. But it’s the work which really counts: and it’s reproduced in this large-format, softback tome, in generous proportions. Like Miro, Picasso and Kandinski reinvented for a party-loving post-war generation of ‘hipsters, flipsters and finger-poppin’ daddies’; it’s not too fanciful to imagine that words like ‘screwball’ and ‘zany’ could have been conceived principally to describe Flora’s colourful, kaleidoscopic output long before they were misappropriated by the likes of Jerry Lewis and our own hairy cornflake, DLT. Flora seems to have benefited immensely from the 
artistic freedom which came with his being there at what was effectively
the birth of the illustrated record sleeve at the beginning of the
1940s. ‘I got away with murder, didn’t I?’ was his
own summation of the situation. Of course, it didn’t last. The
coming of Elvis Presley marked a major shift whereby records could
be sold in part, on the strength of the artists’ sex appeal:
moody photo portraits were in — doodles most definitely out.
Happily though, Flora moved on to become amongst other things, an illustrator and writer of childrens books. However, Flora’s work wasn’t all playful frivolity. While still at college in 1938, Flora hooked up with a wild-eyed proto-beat writer, Robert Lowry, to form the Little Man Press. Here he produced woodcut illustrations which were often quite dark in tone, to accompany Lowry’s fevered short stories. Lowry eventually became a critically-acclaimed writer who was lauded by no less than a man than Ernest Hemingway. However, he was subsequently diagnosed as schizo-phrenic and sectioned, eventually dying broke and lonely.  But then, that’s a whole other story for a future issue of Nude… ©Nude 2005. This is an abdridged version of an article originally published in Nude magazine issue 6 (April / may 2005) |