Jim Flora - Later Life

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 and focus and forget every little ache and pain that I have." A few months later, Flora died in Rowayton, Connecticut from stomach cancer.

The Flora family archive contains hundreds of fascinating paintings, sketches and long-unseen commercial assignments. A few years after the artist's death, his long-neglected paintings and private fine artworks began achieving recognition, thanks to the research and cataloging of co-archivists Irwin Chusid and Barbara Economon, who have compiled three anthologies of Flora's rarely seen works: The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora (2004), The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora (2007), and the Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora (2009), all published by Fantagraphics Books. Chusid and Economon are at work on a fourth book, The High Fidelity Art of Jim Flora (scheduled for Spring 2013).

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.