His private fine art, however, often served as an outlet for the artist's inner demons, as Flora dotted many works with images of violence and sexual excess. (The cover of "The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora" is adorned with figures from his 1940s absurdist burlesque painting, "The Rape of the Stationmaster's Daughter".) Many of his smaller temperas and pen and ink sketches, particularly from the 1940s through the 1960s, featured clusters of unrelated images interlocking like rune-shaped brickwork, every square inch of surface crammed with bizarre figures, some disturbing, some nonsensical, all intriguing. As Flora once explained, "I could never stand a static space." Music was one of Flora's muses, and his montages radiate overtones of improvisation—a one-man band jamming on a canvas. His biographer, Irwin Chusid, said that Flora "crafted rhythmic design in unfathomable meters."