Tom Lovell: "...this youthful-looking, soft-spoken man..."

Last week we looked at the work of several artists who regularly did work for True magazine art director, Norman Kent. I didn't manage to get to every artist Kent featured in his September 1954 article in American Artist magazine. Among those whom I regretfully skipped over was Tom Lovell. I've been meaning to do a week on Lovell for a very long while now -- and since Norman Kent wrote a feature piece on him just a couple of years later (December 1956), this seems like an opportune time to do so.


Kent wrote, "Perhaps the greatest compliment we can pay [Tom Lovell] - and one that should cause him no embarrassment when he sees it in print - is that he is as successful with true-life adventure stories as he is with romantic fiction."


Norman Kent had a lot of nice things to say about Tom Lovell... and the article covers some very interesting ground, describing Lovell's meticulous working methods as well as providing the essential biographical details.


So let's (finally!) spend some time taking a closer look at the work of a man Norman Kent described as "this youthful-looking, soft-spoken man [whose] work has an undated look which removes it from the ephemeral and places it in the category of the older and better tradition."


* My Tom Lovell Flickr set.