Thomas Allen dies

[brownie]

From The New York Times:

Illustrator designed jazz-album covers

Steven Heller, New York Times

Thomas Allen, who helped originate a post-Norman Rockwell style of moodily impressionistic illustration and who was best known for his colorful portraits of country-and-western, bluegrass and jazz musicians for album covers, died Monday at his home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 76.

The cause of death was complications of heart surgery he had last year, his wife, Laura, said.

Allen also did editorial, advertising and children's book illustration and a few weeks before his death had finished the illustrations for Alice Parker's "Hand-Me-Down-Song-Book." He had just begun working on a CD cover for a new bluegrass album by his friend Marty Stuart, the country singer.

Allen originally studied formal painting, not commercial art. In the early '50s, at the Art Institute of Chicago, he was one of a maverick group of illustrators, along with the late Robert Weaver and Robert Andrew Parker, who broke away from a romantic literal mannerism common in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post. Their style was more painterly, though somewhat abstract.

Born on Jan. 28, 1928, in Nashville, Tenn., Allen attended Vanderbilt University on a football scholarship but left for the Art Institute. Upon graduating, he joined the Marines, although before reporting for duty he visited New York to seek editorial illustration assignments.

The first came from Esquire's art director, Henry Wolf, who after Allen's discharge commissioned him to do full-page color paintings and more intricate visual essays. Soon Allen was getting a string of editorial jobs from Seventeen, Colliers, McCall's and Sports Illustrated, as well as advertising work from NBC.

At CBS records, then the premier label for graphic design, the art director Neil Fujita gave Allen his first of many jazz album covers, "The Jazz Odyssey of James Rushing, Esq." The project became a turning point in his work. Although he used his own photographs rather than sketching from life, the time he spent with Rushing at the recording session made the finished work "more authentic," as Allen said.

From then on, he almost always got to meet his subjects. He became a close friend of Earl Scruggs of the bluegrass duo Flatt and Scruggs and created album art for them. Starting in 1966, he did portraits of jazz musicians for Whitney Balliet's columns on jazz in the New Yorker.

His passion for the environment and Americana led to illustrating and writing more than a dozen children's books, including "Good-bye, Charles Lindbergh: Based on a True Story," by Louise Borden, and "In Coal Country," by Judith Hendershot.

In 1983, he was named Hallmark Professor at the University of Kansas, and he was later chairman of the illustration department at the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, where he taught until his death.

In addition to his wife, Allen is survived by a son, two daughters, and four grandchildren.

[alankin]

I found one cover image by him:

Thomas B. Allen illustrated this album cover, "The Jazz Odyssey of James Rushing," in 1987.