I profiled Tim Biskup for Vol.3 of Helio magazine. The article also appears online.
Jim Flora was a prolific jazz record-album illustrator in the 1940s and 1950s. Flora's highly stylized work is flat, fevered and hyperkinetic, often depicting jazz musicians in states of frenzied ecstasy. Biskup had long been aware of Flora's work, but says he didn't "get it." But in the late 1980s, he was in a San Francisco record store and he found a copy of "Shorty Rogers Courts the Count," which Flora had illustrated, and it knocked Tim out. "It was this crazy abstract piano player. I said to my friend, 'This is going to change my art, right here.' My friend who was standing next to me said 'What?' and I said 'This is changing me right now – I can feel it. It's changing the way that I paint.' The shapes, the kind of movement going on. It's something I've been looking for for a long time. I've seen a little bit of it in Miro, I've seen a little of it in Ren and Stimpy, I've seen a little of it in Mary Blair, but… it was just mind-blowing."
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