The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora - Softcover

Chusid, Irwin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1606991590 ISBN 13: 9781606991596

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books, 2009

Synopsis

Jim Flora (1914-1998)'s two previous books (The Mischievous Art and The Curiously Sinister Art), are each in multiple printings. The Sweetly Diabolic Art features paintings, drawings, and sketches from the 1940s through the 1990s, most never previously published or exhibited, as well as more artifacts from Flora's 1940s tenure in the Columbia Records art department and rare newspaper and magazine illustrations spanning several decades. Sweetly Diabolic is also the first printing of an abandoned children's book concept, The X-Ray Eyes of Wallingford Hume. Equally fascinating are original, never-before-published roughs and rejected images from Flora's 1950s and '60s children's books and a gallery of pen and pencil sketches from the 1940s. Sweetly Diabolic also collects, for the first time rarely seen cartoon-science illustrations: the images are augmented by personal vignettes, mementos from the family archives, and a 1984 interview with award-winning graphic designer Robert M. Jones, who offers priceless insights

About this title

About the Author

Jim Flora was born in 1914 in Ohio and passed away in 1998 in Connecticut.

Irwin Chusid, based in Hoboken, NJ, is a journalist, music historian, radio personality and self-described “landmark preservationist.” Since 1975, Chusid has been a DJ on free-form radio station WFMU in New Jersey. He is the author of Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music. He has produced landmark reissues of the music of composer/bandleader/electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott, Space Age Pop avatar Esquivel, the Langley Schools Music Project, and has salvaged the careers of now-celebrated icons like Jim Flora.

Barbara Economon is a digital media specialist at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and a former radio host on KFAI. She provides all image restoration for the Flora collections and produces fine art prints of selected works.

Review

“Jim Flora’s artwork is ultraviolet radiation in tempera and ink―it crackles with such energy, it practically sizzles ozone...This anthology celebrates a visionary whose work is steeped in vari-hued paradox...Yet, despite the raucous energy projected in these hyperactive mosaics, a typical Flora freak circus often projects harmony and balance―an ordered chaos.”
- Mark Frauenfelder, Boing Boing

“Baroque and subversive.”
- Joe Bendel, J. B. Spins

“Picasso, Matisse, Steinberg, my friend Charles ― they all stole from Jim Flora, who was both ahead of his time and before his time.”
- William Wegman

Edition details

• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1606991590
• ISBN 13: 9781606991596
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 180