From a studio in the garage of his mid-century-modern home, located on a wooded hillside outside Cincinnati, Ohio, over the last 50 years Charles Harper has created a vast body of work—and a cult following of naturalists and modernists.
The idea of wildlife art generally conjures images of Audubon prints mounted in medical offices and Saturday-afternoon how-to-paint shows on TV. Not so for Charles Harper. In Harper’s hands, the T square and French curve reduce animals and their environs to their barest geometry. In the introduction to his 1974 collection, Birds and Words, he wrote, “I never counted the feathers in the wings. . . . I just count the wings.” With bold planes of color, exacting lines, and inexhaustible wit, Harper captures the veracious essence of each scene he depicts.
Starting in the 1950s, Harper gained acclaim as a commercial illustrator with The Golden Book of Biology and Betty Crocker’s Dinner for Two cookbook, and a steady stream of work for the Ford Motor Company’s monthly magazine, Ford Times, followed. Harper’s work for Ford became so popular with readers that he started a silk-screening operation in his basement to fulfill mail-order demands for his prints of birds, fish, and Model Ts. It was also with Ford that he began writing the infamous captions that accompany each of his works. In the late ’60s, the Frame House Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky, began to distribute larger-edition serigraphs, and Harper would reach an even greater audience with his iconic posters for the National Park Service.
Recently, we stopped by Charles and Edie Harper’s home and studio in Cincinnati, Ohio, for an afternoon chat and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to sift through his personal archives. He’s still hard at work at 83.
I suppose it did. I connected with nature—I was absorbing it, but not aware of it. I didn’t really get on to biology and nature until I illustrated The Golden Book of Biology for Golden Press, and then I really had to buckle down and learn—the processes for the diagrams, and the connection between natural events, and so on. I learned a lot and kept on going.
Edie and I met in art school, and the trip was our honeymoon. We drove from Cincinnati to the West Coast—Oregon, down to L.A.—and back over to Florida in three months. We took Edie’s Chevy and camped along the way. We visited all the national parks and scenic wonders. I still refer to things I remember from that trip. It was important to me.
Yes. I started realizing that in order to get a whole bunch of stuff on a piece of paper, you had to simplify it. So a Rocky Mountain or something like that, you couldn’t fit everything in, but you could get the impression by flattening it out. That appealed to me. I still have samples of superrealism from art school. But suddenly on this trip it came to me that this is silly. Nature did it better. I couldn’t try to compete. Edie happened to get into that at the same time and we progressed together and helped each other.
[Ford was] very influential in my development because they had a great art director, Arthur Lougee, whom I consider my mentor if anybody was. He gave me a chance to do all kinds of stories and encouraged me to write, which I had not done before. In fact, I was a replacement for E. B. White, who did the captions for the first prints I made. Arthur got requests from readers for reproductions of the magazines, which he couldn’t supply, so he had the idea of artists making prints of their work that had appeared in the magazine—which was great. He gave all the money to the artists. Silk screening fit perfectly with the way I was thinking about form—flattened-out planes of color. It had a great influence on my work, but I’d never do it again!
Well, the work for Ford—“Western Birds,” “Bird Architects,” “America’s Vanishing Birds”—each of those gave me a reason to learn something more. I didn’t know a thing about birds. I still don’t. I’m the world’s worst bird-watcher, so I do my bird-watching in a guidebook. I’m a little bit embarrassed by that, because I am surrounded by experts. I’ve got every bird guide that I can get my hands on. It impresses me how each artist interprets a bird, and I thought I could make it a little different too.
My favorite is Jesus Bugs from 1969. It’s hanging in the bedroom. I don’t know why exactly, but I think it’s because it was the first thing that ever really interested me and that I connected with in nature. The idea of them skating around and casting their shadows underneath the water and flowing along the ripples was enchanting to me. I used to lie along the creek bank and watch them do that on the farm, then I found out that they’re called Jesus bugs.
A poster for the new ornithology building at Cornell and a piece that shows what might happen to you if you use your cell phone while you’re driving. [It depicts] an auto wreck from last year because the spring wildflowers are growing up around the steering wheel and the skull and so on. A cell phone will be in the skeletal hand [of the driver] and a house wren is building his nest in the skull. The house wren builds several nests in his attempt to attract females, so the name of this picture is Can You Hear Me Now?
