Robert Kresin in Childcraft

A big part of what I hope to accomplish with Today's Inspiration is to showcase not just the celebrated illustrators of the 50's -- but those who are virtually unknown as well. For example, Robert Kresin.


I've never seen Kresin's work before, but he appears throughout these many volumes of the Childcraft series. Kresin was proficient in any number of styles... these are only a small example of his versatility.


I have a real fondness for illustrators who work in a great variety of styles - which might explain, at least in part, why I'm drawn to Kresin's illustrations. I get the sense that he was an artist who enjoyed trying new things... and the quality of every one of his pieces speaks to the underlying skill he had, no matter what surface technique he employed.


While there is really no information about Kresin on the internet, I suspect he was a Chicago area illustrator. The Childcraft books were published by Field Enterprises, a Chicago publisher, and a great many of the illustrations and photos throughout the set are credited to Chicago art studios.

* You'll find these a few more pieces by the artist in my Robert Kresin Flickr set. His zig-zaggy line style is particularly nice when seen at full size.

Charles Harper in Childcraft

Oh Happy Day!

On Friday I finally located a set of Childcraft books in a little thrift shop in Grimsby. Ever since I first found a random batch of these incredible books about a year ago I've coveted a complete set. The sheer quantity of artwork and artists represented in the few volumes I owned left me feeling half-crazed with curiousity about who might have done work in the other books.


Well now I know... and WOW... you're gonna freak when you see all the beautiful artwork I'll be bringing you in the coming weeks and months!

For starters: Charles Harper. If, like me, you were unfamiliar with this illustrator/designer's elegant style until now, then its my great pleasure to introduce you to his work.


If you were already a Charles Harper fan, hopefully these pieces are new to you.

Unfortunately, Harper passed away only a few days ago. But he was much loved and celebrated right to the end. My pal, Ward Jenkins, recently posted about Harper on his always excellent blog The Ward-O-Matic, where he provides lots of great info and links for Charles Harper fans - new and old - to check out. I encourage you take a look!


For me, Harper's style is incredibly striking... both inspirational and educational. His wonderful design sense brings a truly impactful quality to an already masterful and thoroughly modern technique.


I've got a couple more of Harper's Childcraft illos, as well as larger versions of what you see here today, in my new Charles Harper Flickr set.

Summer is for kids

Aahh summer! When you're a kid (and I know most of you were probably kids at one time) summer means freedom. It means sleeping in and eating sugar cereal every day for breakfast and riding your bike all over the place - maybe even to the school yard, just to gloat at the locked doors and windows - and staying out 'til half an hour after it gets dark... and lemonade stands.


Oh yeah - and Father's Day!

Yes, Father's Day, the most underwhelming day of the year. On Mother's Day there's flowers and chocolates and maybe even dinner out at a fancy restaurant. And "Every Day is Kids' Day", as our parents used to say... but Father's Day always strikes me as a bit of an afterthought. And by the almost complete lack of ads promoting Father's Day in my collection of old magazines from the 50's, I'd say advertisers pretty much felt the same way.

So what do you get the guy who goes off to work every day to keep a roof over your head and food on the table? Why, underpants, of course! Now that's the way to celebrate a holiday!


Because nothing says, "I love you Dad" like a good ol' pair of Fruit of the Loom dad-size underpants. Happy Father's Day, everybody!

Cool Summer Fashions... 50's Style!

The coolest, hippest fashions were born in the 50's. Everything since has just been a refinement. Take these RayBans, for example... even today, half a century later, you'd get a lot a compliments if you were seen wearing a pair of these.


And - sorry surfer shorts and tank tops - you got nothin' on this family set of matching beach wear. The folks at Catalina knew how to dress us up with class for summer. I predict today's fashion designers will soon be imitating this look - if they haven't already done so.


So how do you complete a snappy summer outfit?

Why with a pair of U.S. Keds, of course. My son just bought himself a pair of shoes identical to the red hightop shown below. Not actual U.S. Keds - his are made of hemp and come from No Sweat Apparel - but that classic 50's style hasn't changed a bit.


Why? 'Cause its cool!

Sargent's Summer

Here's a moment I think we can all relate to: the first morning of summer vacation.


Of the many regular cover artists the Saturday Evening Post employed, Dick Sargent has to be one of my favourites. His gentle sense of humour and ability to capture those genuine moments of everyday life, always executed with great skill and solid craftsmanship, never fail to please.


Dick Sargent is on my list of illustrators who need to be showcased over the course of a week. For now, these two scans will have to do... and there's a third one in my Dick Sargent Flickr set.

Summer Stylization

It kind of incredible, isn't it... this style is 50 years old!


I can remember when some artists from Reactor in Toronto began producing illustrations in this style back in the mid-1980's. It seemed like a really vital, contemporary, avant-garde look. Imagine how truly avant-garde it must have looked to the public three decades earlier...


I now think of this style as the Thomas Vroman look. He's the only artist I've come across from the 50's who put a signature to work done in this style... though I'm sure there were many others. If you've never taken a close look at his work, spend a few minutes perusing my Thomas Vroman Flickr set.

Summer's Here!

Ok, not officially... but it sure feels like summer, doesn't it?


And with the imminent arrival of summer I propose we all spend a little less time in front of the computer and a little more time enjoying the great outdoors.

That's why I'll be cutting back on long posts and multiple images for the next couple of months. You'll still find one or two images here each weekday... but I'm going to take a break from researching and writing and scanning, scanning, scanning.

So if the weather's as nice where you are as it is here in sunny Southern Ontario, then I encourage you to get outside for lunch today. Take a stroll, do a little gardening when you get home tonight and and enjoy SUMMER!

Fletcher Martin: Strength and Sensitivity

All the while that Fletcher Martin was drawing and painting scenes of masculinity and conflict he was also returning again and again to the female form - clothed, seminude and nude.

These images are like the opposite side of the coin. While Martin's men often have a primal toughness, an almost Neanderthal quality about them, his women are always a vision of loveliness and gentility. Even in his earliest pieces, like this painting of a prostitute (below), sexuality is subsumed by an obvious affection and sensitivity for womankind.


In this entire volume* I've been referencing all week, among all the many paintings of women, there is not a single image where Martin portrays women in anything but a sympathetic light. This was clearly a man who loved women.


During the late 1940's Fletcher Martin married his second wife and they had two sons. This coincided with a change in the artist's work. Over the next decade the violent images of his youth began to recede and were replaced more and more by images of women...


...and children.


Asked about this new element in his work, Martin shrugged it off, saying simply that at that point in his life "the children were just there."


But I get the sense that there's more to it than that. Martin's ability to capture the quality of childhood in his paintings of children suggest that he never lost touch with his own inner child. He once said, "It seems to me that the stimulation and motivation for my painting today is not unlike it was in my youth. The drawings I made as a child were fantasies on a theme, and so, in essence, are all my paintings, with few exceptions... "


"They are all inventions."


William Saroyan, the prolific author and playwright, who befriended Martin when the artist was still quite young, described Fletcher Martin in this manner:

"The thing that is memorable about him was a quality of quietude. He seemed to be at home in the world. He spoke slowly and in a deep voice. Everybody else I was apt to meet in those days seemed to be in a hurry. He wasn't. One sensed in his nature the strength of a sensitive and gentle personality."


* From the book "Fletcher Martin" © 1977 Harry N. Abrams Inc.

* All of today's images can be seen at full size in my Fletcher Martin Flickr set.

Fletcher Martin: Tough Guy

Considering the circumstances of Fletcher Martin's youth and young adulthood, its no surprise that themes of violence, masculinity, sports and conflict were something the artist returned to time and again.


One observer said, "I have heard Martin talk of dynamite charges with a foreman on a construction site while continuing to work on a half-finished watercolour." As a war correspondent for Life magazine he is said to have "moved among the military with ease, understanding the enlisted man's experience at first hand."


And he is elsewhere described as "the self-taught ex-prize fighter who looked like a pirate of the Spanish Main but painted with a great generosity of spirit."


During the 40's and 50's Martin kept one foot in the world of fine arts and the other in the realm of illustration. He received many commissions for sports-themed paintings but he was also commissioned to illustrate books and, thanks to his reputation as a documentarian, established by his Life magazine assignments, he was asked by the Lucky Strikes Cigarette Company to travel to North Carolina and paint scenes of tobacco production.

In 1950 Abbott Laboratories comissioned the artist to visually document the health conditions among many native North American tribes. He travelled over 20,000 miles on assignment to thirteen reservations and to Alaska. His efforts resulted in a Merit award from the Chicago Art Directors Club.


During this busy period Martin's style evolved and he began to place more importance on colour - but always at the core of each piece was his belief that design was the foundation upon which all art must be built.

"The design is the scaffolding of the picture," said Martin. "It is the trunk and the branches for the foliage and fruit - the foliage and fruit of value and color. Design is the force that maintains order in the composition and conducts the eye through it, revealing unexpected delights for the vision of the spectator."


In 1955 Fletcher Martin won a Gold Medal from the New York Art Director's Club - and it is around that time that his work began appearing in Collier's magazine. He was also receiving assignments from Sports Illustrated (of course) and Woman's Day.

This, for me, represents an important turning point in the history of contemporary illustration because it marks the recognition and acceptance of a new sort of stylization in commercial art by the business and the public. At a time when idealized realism still dominated the printed page, artists like Fletcher Martin were heralding an approach that would ultimately survive the "illustration recession" that began in the early 60's.


Fletcher Martin must have felt the same thing - though on a far grander scale.

As an evolving artist living in those times he once said: "Although art springs from nature, the artist is the interpreter, not the imitator. The forms of nature are so diverse that there is no symbol of color or shape whose counterpart cannot be found. This decade has seen a real evolution in the attitude of the artist. Though we cannot be sure of where painting is going, it seems possible that in the future the abstract synthesis of nature will probably be the most significant form."


* From the book "Fletcher Martin" © 1977 Harry N. Abrams Inc.

* All of today's images can be seen at full size in my Fletcher Martin Flickr set.

Fletcher Martin: Self-Taught Teacher

With Fletcher Martin's discharge from the Navy in San Francisco in 1926 the young man's growth, personally, artistically, and intellectually began in earnest. He married, found employment in a printshop where his boss recognized and nurtured his artistry, began voraciously reading books on science, mathematics, philosophy, sociology and literature and sought out art and artists so he might learn from experience what he had never had for lack of formal schooling.


Along the way he began winning important art competitions and receiving one-man shows. With his reputation as an important emerging artist coming to the attention of the Federal Arts Project, Martin received a commission to paint a mural in the auditorium of the North Hollywood High School (above). It was immediately acclaimed by both professional critics and the public and resulted in further mural commissions that took him from California to Texas to Idaho.

Along the way, Martin, who had never attended a professional art school, began teaching drawing classes at the Art Center School in L.A. and, in 1940, after a successful first one man show in New York City and the accompanying critical acclaim, Martin was offered the chance to replace Grant Wood as the artist-in-residence at the University of Iowa and then, a year later, he replaced Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute.

In spite of the many teaching situations Martin found himself in over the course of his career, he always doubted the value of a formalized art education. Martin believed that his role as a teacher was to ensure that his students enthusiasm for teaching themselves was always maintained.

"It takes a certain natural skill, a creative attitude toward life and a profound, unswerving interest to become an artist. The rewards," said Martin, "are abundant but rarely material."


In 1943 Fletcher Martin had achieved a level of recognition that brought him to the attention of the editors of Life magazine. Along with several others, he was asked to travel overseas and document America's war effort. His first assignment took him to North Africa to Tunisia where his earlier experiences as an enlisted man in the Navy served him well. Martin executed over two hundred sketches like the one below, developing several into finished paintings (as can be seen in the two examples above).


After a brief return to the United States, Martin accepted a second assignment, this time to London, where he witnessed the horrific fighting in northern France and the destruction caused by the V-2 rocket bombardment of London. The high-profile exposure Martin's work received in the 1943 Christmas issue of Life (13 colour pages plus the cover) meant that millions of Americans now knew who Fletcher Martin was.

In that sense, Martin had bridged the divide between fine and commercial art.


* From the book "Fletcher Martin" © 1977 Harry N. Abrams Inc.

* All of today's images can be seen at full size in my Fletcher Martin Flickr set.

Fletcher Martin: Life on the Frontier

Most of us know about the wild west of the American frontier from books and movies... but how many can claim to have been born and raised in such an environment? Fletcher Martin was born in 1904 in the town of Palisade, Colorado, population 300, into a family that would eventually number seven children.


Martin's restless father had been heading for the Klondike when he found his calling: he returned to Leadville, Colorado, married his sweetheart and started a local newspaper. Over the course of his childhood and early teens, Fletcher Martin would see his father move the family to several tiny western towns and start up or purchase a town paper. When the Martin children were not attending classes in various one room school houses, they became the staff of Martin senior's hand-set, hand-fed newspapers. Here young Fletcher Martin received his first exposure to art. In those remote parts, the ads in his father's newspaper for cigarettes, farm equipment and Ford motor cars and the posters around the town announcing visiting circuses and rodeos were the only printed matter available.


It was a school chum's drawings of bloody cowboy-and-indian battles that began Fletcher Martin's career as an artist. Intrigued by his friend's 'magical' skills, Martin decided to try his hand at depicting similarly savage scenes.

Martin's teens, like those of any young person's in that time and place, were filled with farm chores and family duties. He learned every aspect of the printing business but he also worked with horses and cattle and in orchards and fields. When a rare spare moment came, he spent it sketching. In yet another small town, the village of Kamiah, Martin was exposed to his first "real" professional artist... a drifter who did a brisk business in the local barber shop selling primitive paintings for two dollars a piece. The townfolk, in those days before mass entertainment and visual overload, were dazzled by his wizardry.


Another series of moves brought the Martin family to Seattle. At age thirteen, with America entering the First World War, Fletcher Martin found employment at a seven-dollar-per-week job as a "printer's devil" with a firm that produced gaudy outdoor advertising posters. Beyond the technical skills the young teenager acquired, Martin learned about colour and composition from the garish, eye-catching prints of trapeze artists, bucking broncos and other carnival imagery produced by the artists who designed and cut the big basswood printing blocks used in the shop.

In spite of this direct exposure and his interest in art, by age 16 Fletcher Martin had still never been to a museum or seen a single first-rate painting. His father once again moved the family to another hamlet - Craigmont, Idaho - and purchased another local paper. But eventually the young Fletcher Martin heard adventure calling him. He worked in the mountains on a surveying crew, drove a mule team and harvested wheat, he operated a projector in a movie theatre and finally, he ran away from home and lived as a hobo, harvesting fruit.


After a failed attempt to return home and finish high school, Martin spent a year drifting around the North-west. He worked in fields, lumbercamps, printshops and on highway construction jobs. All the while he was sketching - though mostly pornographic images to amuse his companions. He rode the rails, including the "rods" - the horizontal bars under freight cars where a man can find just enough room to lay down and hang on for dear life. Through all of his adventures, good and bad, he refused to beg. Years later he said, "None of this was real hardship. Everything was so exciting or potentially so. It was freedom, movement, change, life, color, and drama. It was ...awful and wonderful."

But during the dark times of the 1922 Depression, out of work and without prospect, Fletcher Martin succumbed to the lure of a Navy recruiter's promise of food and shelter. Lying about his age, the 17 year old signed up. Within a year he was facing a summary court-martial and then, later, a deck court-martial which resulted in a trip to Panama in the brig.


Martin was a U.S. Navy signalman and during the following three years he visited Pago Pago, Australia, Hawaii, the Caribbean and New Zealand. Off duty he became a light-heavyweight boxer with the fleet.


* From the book "Fletcher Martin" © 1977 Harry N. Abrams Inc.

* All of today's images can be seen at full size in my Fletcher Martin Flickr set.

The Avante-garde School: Fletcher Martin

We've spent quite a bit of time over the last few weeks looking at the work of the Old School and the New School - and Al Parker's unique place in spearheading innovation among the more progressive of the mainstream. But there was another way of illustrating that was beginning to emerge in the 50's: The Avant-garde School.


If you've been reading this blog for some time you'll recall past posts on artists like Aurelius Battaglia, Jane Oliver, Jim Flora, Jan Balet and Thomas Vroman, all of whom were getting work published in mainstream American magazines - though compared to illustrators who created works of "idealized realism", the quantity of assignments these artists received was miniscule.

To their ranks I would add the name Fletcher Martin.


A year or two ago I came across the piece below in the March 30, 1956 issue of Collier's magazine. Since then I have found barely a half dozen more pieces by the artist. I had thought that I would probably never be able to see a good quantity of his stunning stylized artwork - then, last week, I found a huge, gorgeous coffee table collection of Fletcher Martin's work in a used bookstore in Toronto. What a revelation!


Martin's life was a series of incredible adventures and experiences. This self taught artist had virtually no exposure to art of any kind while growing up, thus he had no real outside influences.


This week let's take a look at this fascinating pioneer of the Avant-garde School of illustration.

You can see these images at full size in my new Fletcher Martin Flickr set.

Al Parker: 1969

The last paragraph of Al Parker's biography in Walt Reed's Illustrator in America says, "Parker moved to Carmel, California by 1961, and with the demise of many of the magazines, his output of illustrations was curtailed. He continued to do occassional assignments for publications such as Sports Illustrated and Boys' Life."


I had heard once that Al Parker became disillusioned with the way the illustration business had experienced such a dramatic decline in the early 60's, but when I asked Parker's friend, Barbara Bradley, about this she wrote back, "I did not hear him speak of disillusionment. He may have been but always seemed to be busy on something. The only time he had trouble is if he were not given a deadline. Western magazine (the Southern Californian AAA magazine, commissioned him to do a cover, the subject being wildflowers. I saw some of his sketches, among them a beautifully designed bouquet of wildflowers. He said that he'd never finished it because they told him to do it whenever he wanted. He NEEDED a deadline."


And David Apatoff kindly contacted Bernie Fuchs on my behalf with the same query and got this reply via Bernie's wife, Babe:

"I checked with Bernie and he said he had never heard anything about Parker ever being "disillusioned" with illustration. He thinks Al just wanted to try something different, and decided to move to California. At that time there was no FedEx or overnight deliveries and so it may not have been as easy to work for NY AD's from there. Bernie remembers a bunch of American Airlines ads Parker did in the 60's and of course he always worked for Boy's Life because the AD was such a good friend."

My thanks to Barbara, David and the Fuchs' for helping to clarify this point.

*The Norman Rockwell Museum is about to showcase Al Parker's work in a major retrospective. Go to the Rockwell Museum's site for more information.