BIRDS WITH HUMOR

 

It seems to be the time for birds. Everyday I see a large calendar over my desk featuring the fun art of CHARLEY HARPER, who was a Cincinnati-based American Modernist artist, best known for his highly stylized wildlife prints, posters, and book illustrations. I love his work because of his great sense of humor and his sometimes play on words. For example, his  pileated woodpecker pecking for ants he titled “Antypasto". 

Charley was born in Frenchton, West Virginia, in 1922 into a farming family. On his family farm, he developed an early appreciation and love of animals as well as design  which influenced his work to his last days. 

He attended West Virginia Wesleyan College and graduated from the Cincinnati Art Academy, where he also taught for many years

Supposedly on the first day, Charley met fellow artist Edie McKee*, whom he married shortly after graduation in 1947. 

After a WWII tour of duty with the 104th Infantry in Europe, aided by an art scholarship,  he went on a four-months' painting tour of the country with his bride. He worked in a Cincinnati studio as a commercial artist by day and in his home as a fine artist by night."

Charley returned to the Art Academy of Cincinnati as a teacher and also worked for a commercial firm before working on his own. He and his wife worked out of their Roselawn and Finneytown homes, and later, with their only child, Brett Harper, formed Harper Studios.

Charley Harper died of pneumonia in Cincinnati on Sunday, June 10, 2007, at age 84.

During his career, Charley Harper illustrated numerous books, notably The Golden Book of Biology, magazines such as Ford Times, as well as many prints, posters, and other works. As his subjects are mainly natural, with birds prominently featured, Charley often created works for many nature-based organizations, among them the National Park Service, Cincinnati Zoo, Cincinnati Nature Center, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Hamilton County (Ohio) Park District, and Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania. He also designed interpretive displays for Everglades National Park.

In a style he called "minimal realism", Charley Harper captured the essence of his subjects with the fewest possible visual elements. When asked to describe his unique visual style, Charley responded: 

When I look at a wildlife or nature subject, I don't see the feathers in the wings, I just count the wings. I see exciting shapes, color combinations, patterns, textures, fascinating behavior, and endless possibilities for making interesting pictures. I regard the picture as an ecosystem in which all the elements are interrelated, interdependent, perfectly balanced, without trimming or unutilized parts; and herein lies the lure of painting; in a world of chaos, the picture is one small rectangle in which the artist can create an ordered universe.”

He began his career by creating very realistic pictures but began to lose his interest in this approach. This skill wasn't wasted, however, for as he said “You’ve got to know how to put everything in before you will know what you can leave out successfully.”

"I felt shackled by the laws of perspective and shading and decided that the constant attempt to create the illusion of three dimensions on the two-dimensional plane of the picture was limiting me as an artist. Realistic painting persuades the viewer that he is looking into space rather than at a flat surface. It denies the picture plane, which I affirm and use as an element of design. Wildlife art has been dominated by realism, but I have chosen to do it differently because I think flat, hard-edge and simple."

Charlie said it was the difference between painting the thing itself or painting a picture of the thing. "I didn’t start out to paint a bird – the bird already existed. I started out to paint a picture of a bird, a picture which didn’t exist before I came along, a picture which gives me a chance to share with you my thoughts about the bird.

Once you accept this seemingly simplistic but really quite profound premise, you will appreciate the many varied approaches to the making of pictures, all of which start where realism leaves off, but all of which require an understanding of realism for their successful execution.”

He contrasted his nature-oriented artwork with the realism of John James Audubon, drawing influence from Cubism, Minimalism, Einsteinian physics and countless other developments in Modern art and science. His style distilled and simplified complex organisms and natural subjects, yet they are often arranged in a complex fashion.

His serigraphs were large expanses of rich color, which gave the viewer a very different perspective on the animal kingdom. He was a conservationist as well as an artist, revealing the unique aspects of  wildlife subjects through highly stylized geometric reduction. 

 He said he was "the only wildlife artist who has never been compared to Audubon," yet his wildlife art was just as instructive - the only difference was that he laced his lessons with humor.Charlie believed that humor made it easier to encourage changes in our attitudes and awareness of environmental concerns.

On the subject of his simplified forms, Charley noted:

"I don't think there was much resistance to the way I simplified things. I think everybody understood that. Some people liked it and others didn't care for it. There's some who want to count all the feathers in the wings and then others who never think about counting the feathers, like me.”

The results are bold, colorful, and often whimsical. The designer Todd Oldham wrote of him, "Charley's inspired yet the accurate color sense is undeniable, and when combined with the precision he exacts on rendering only the most important details, one is always left with a sense of awe." Charley, on numerous examples, also went outside the medium of graphic art and included short prose poems for the artwork he made.    

In his art work Charlie  imaginatively investigated the similarities between human and wild animal behaviors, but completely without anthropomorphism. "I learn as much as I can about the creatures that interest me, and they all do. I observe them and find out how they interact with each other and their environments and ask myself, 'What if?'"

In 2002 his artwork was selected for the International Migratory Bird Day conservation theme- Exploring Habitats.

*EDIE McKee HARPER was an American photographer, artis and wildlife conservationist, working in many mediums, including sculptures, paintings, textiles, jewelry and lithographs for 60 years. She died 3 years after Charlie.

Birds: top- Pileated woodpecker

 Left-  Clair de Loon

Right- Barn swallow

Left- Goldfinch

Right- "His eyes are on the sparrows"

Left- Scissortail flycatcher

Rigt- Rosebreasted  Grosebeak