Artist of the Month; Franklin Booth

Franklin Booth was an American illustrator whose style of drawing was developed due to a misunderstanding. Being self taught, he apparently misunderstood the nature of wood cut prints and taught himself to draw ink line illustrations based on wood cuts. He appears to have had a natural flair for composition, and a love of silent space, and as the quality of his line developed, he became an influential, though largely ignored artist. Norman Rockwell sung his praises and he would later become a primary influence on Bernie Wrightson also.


I've not inlcluded any of his ink line drawings in this post, but this isn't a reflection on their quality, they are marvellous, but rather because I became aware of Booth's work from the illustrations he did for a book titled; 'The Flying Islands of the Night' by James Whitcomb Riley. What struck me about these images was how the artist, whom I did not then know, had composed the images, which are fantastically well drawn, in a most singluarly vertical manner.


A closer inspection of Booth's work reveals a large body of superbly detailed pictures which I could happily fill my whole blog with if I had the right to do so, but since this is merely a salute to an artist's genius, and not a gallery I will content myself by suggesting you, dear reader, might perform a google image search for Franklin Booth's name and enjoy for yourself the magic which can be acheived with just an architects pen and a sheet of paper.


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