Bill Peckmann &Books &Illustration &Rowland B. Wilson 02 Apr 2010 08:21 am
Rowland Wilson’s Whites
- Last week, I’d posted some dragon models that Rowland B. Wilson did for animation company Phil Kimmelman & Ass. for ‘Utica Club Beer’. Well, it turns out Rowland liked the model enough that he kept this painting on the wall in his studio at home. The color image was sent to Bill Peckmann, who shares it with us, by Suzanne Wilson, Rowland’s wife.
This is the model posted last week.
Here’s the image which hung in RBW’s studio.
All that I can follow that up with are more Rowland B. Wilson cartoons. Bill Peckmann had sent me a xerox copy of the book The Whites of Their Eyes, a collection of RBW cartoons printed in 1962 by Dutton. The copies are all B&W though it’s obvious some of them were printed in color. Many thanks to Bill for another great post featuring one of my favorite artists.
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on 02 Apr 2010 at 11:22 am 1.Cesare said …
THANK YOU!
on 02 Apr 2010 at 5:14 pm 2.Denis Wheary said …
Great to see more Rowland B. Wilson art! How nice of of Mrs. Wilson, Mr. Peckmann and you, Michael, to share RBW’s work.
“The Whites of Their Eyes” is still readily available through ABEbooks and Amazon.com., with several copies listed for less than $10! The 95 page volume was taken mostly from Rowland’s work in ESQUIRE magazine. The majority of the cartoons are full page, black & white, with a few one or two color washes. “Destination Istanbul, on the Orient Express”, a four page drama of spies on that legendary train, suffers from a lack of color and a reduction in size from its original published appearance in ESQUIRE (December 1960)
The jokes are still funny, many of Rowland’s best, based mostly on history and literary themes rather than sex and life-style emphasized in PLAYBOY magazine. It should be noted that the sum of all RBW’s cartoons in PLAYBOY rely less on sexual situations and nudity than any other PLAYBOY cartoonist, with the exception of Gahan Wilson, whose speciality, of course, was horror.
If anybody is interested, I’m finishing up a checklist of Rowland’s PLAYBOY cartoons and New England Life ads, and I like sharing. It was in those two cartoon series that Rowland Wilson’s genius as a color stylist was best demonstrated.