Reblogged from staceythinx
Selected work by Charley Harper (1922-2007). You can see his work on display through February 26 at Beguiled by the Wild: The Art of Charley Harper at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University .
Harper on how he developed his distinctive style:
I needed a job. A commerical art studio took a chance on my potential as a realistic illustrator, and soon regretted it. I was too realistic. I enjoyed painting real people with all the wrinkles and crow’s feet that gave character to their faces, but I was no good at the idealized, vacuous, happy housewives that greet you from every soap ad. Ever see one with bags under her eyes? A double chin? No. They never used any of mine. They tried me on cyst drawings for a medical booklet and I was real good at that. But there’s never any great demand for cyst drawings.
It was the most successful failure of my life because it made me realize that in order to succeed as an illustrator I must offer something besides realism, something unique and enjoyable yet salable. I began to search for something peculiarly me – a style, a technique, a point of view – and gradually it emerged: the impulse to caricature and simplify at the same time.
I fought the housewife battle by day and experimented with my new approach by night. Dropping the 3D and thinking flat, I looked at objects orthographically, which often led to fresh viewpoints and invariably revealed the particular projection that read fastest and made the best design. I reduced all lines and edges to straights and curves (that’s all there are) and began to render with mechanical drawing instrumentsruling pen, compass, French curve, T-square, triangle…Nature subjects, I found, are ideally suited to this interpretation. Birds and fish in particular have built-in functional beauty imposed by their habitats and require only a little distortion of what’s there already, a thinning of lines and a simpler statement of shape.
Read more of Charley’s story here.
