Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Rowland B. Wilson did many different types of illustration over the years. Thanks to Bill Peckmann and the loan from Denis Wheary we can post some of these oddities.

Here is a 1962 book from the Columbia Record Club titled ‘Musical Cartoon Album’. It included cartoons by an assortment of the well known cartoonists of the day. Rowland had his gag in there, fortunately for us.

Front Cover / Back Cover

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There is the prestigious job of doing a book for Colorforms. I’m not sure if they even have Colorforms today. It was a shiny plastic/rubberized sort of cut out doll that you’d pick up and place on the other pages of the book to form your own pictures. There was even a set in the Museum of Modern Art that just dealt with abstract shapes that you’d recreate into your own 20th Century Art Form. Bill Peckmann writes:

‘Wizard of OZ’ is a super find that Denis Wheary made. Both Suzanne Wilson and I were not aware that Rowland had done the book. We’re both trying to come with a publishing date, but the nearest we can come to is probably the very early 1970′s. It was definitely before Row went to Richard Williams in 1973. Those were the years RBW was very hot in the print world and a had an ace sales rep, he did not get much sleep in those days.

This is The Wizard of Oz, drawn and designed by Rowland. To get the sense of the book, I’ve posted small thumbnails of the images so they can sit side by side. If you click on any of the images it’ll enlarge to a good readable size.

Front Cover

Inner

Colorforms page

The card with the Colorforms on it came in a sleeve on the title page.

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Back Cover

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Here from 1977, is an editorial illustration Rowland did for the Sunday supplement of the New York Daily News. The yellowing of the newsprint paper is starting to show, but that seems to work with the subject matter of the illustration.

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Since you’ve already posted art from Rowland’s 1970′s Utica Club’s ‘Mountie’ TV commercial a number of years ago, I thought you might like to see the original thumbnail, production storyboard of that spot.

It’s a collaboration between Rowland and Phil Kimmelman done at Focus Design Studios.

Rowland always knew how to make a person feel good, even years later after working at all of the different animation studios that he did, he would tell us, that he always remembered those early animated commercial days as some of his most favorite, he just loved those ‘jam sessions’, and man, so did we!. It also helped that ad agencies picked Rowland to do the spot, which meant he was given carte blanche!

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Finally, here’s a piece of RBW spec art done to land a TV spot at PK&A. Sadly the ad agency’s brains were out to lunch and the job never happened. (Circa 1980)

We’ll continue this post on Friday.

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