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Obituary

'Lampoon' art director, muralist Bramley dies

By CRAIG BASSE
Published April 16, 2005

ST. PETERSBURG - Peter Bramley, a noted cartoonist and artist whose murals brighten businesses along Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street N, has died at 60.

Mr. Bramley, a founding art director of the National Lampoon humor magazine, died Tuesday (April 12, 2005) at St. Anthony's Hospital after a short illness, said his wife, Nano Riley.

He painted "the muses" above Wilson's bookstore, as well as murals at Hook's sushi bar and the Casual Clam.

At Dave's restaurant, he painted "glorious pigs," as a 1995 visitor observed, that beamed down "like Michelangelo's angels on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel."

His winged pigs at the restaurant joined uncounted numbers of pigs in porcelain, china and lead and displayed in photos, oil paintings and piggy banks. The restaurant owner later banished most of the portable pigs, but Mr. Bramley's porkers still fly on the ceiling.

For the past few years he painted holiday art at Christmas and Easter on Dave's restaurant windows. He also painted murals, including a rendition of the Crescent Lake Park banyan tree, on three sides of the building.

"I wanted to give something back to the neighborhood that we all know," Mr. Bramley once said.

A Massachusetts native, he came here in 1984 from New York City where, as the publisher of All Duck Comics and Cloud Comics, he was "an influential cartoonist in the underground comics era," his wife said.

"He loved being a cartoonist," she said. "He was pretty silly."

Mr. Bramley also did illustrations for the New York Times op-ed page, and his work appeared in Sesame Street, Electric Company and other national magazines.

His work was internationally recognized, his wife said, with gallery shows in New York, Paris, Philadelphia and Boston.

Locally, he was the designer of Florida's Vanishing Wildlife, (Great Outdoors, 1993), a coloring book for children.

Since moving to St. Petersburg, he became interested in garden art, and he sold his hand-painted hanging snake plant hangers at the Green Thumb Festival and other arts and crafts shows in the bay area.

Born in Newton, Mass., Mr. Bramley grew up in Braintree, Mass. With a bachelor's degree in fine arts from Massachusetts College of Art, he moved to New York City, his home for about 20 years, and founded Cloud Studio with Bill Skurski, a fellow MCA classmate. He and Skurski became the founding art directors of National Lampoon in 1970.

Survivors in addition to his wife include two sons, Gareth, Baltimore, and Lymond, Philadelphia; a brother, Steven Bramley, Sharon, Mass.; a sister, Roberta Hassett, Eastham, Mass.; and two granddaughters, Alexis and Madison, Baltimore.

National Cremation Society, St. Petersburg, is in charge of arrangements.

Information from Times files was used in this obituary.

[Last modified April 16, 2005, 01:21:18]