Wildlife Art That Really "Highleates"—The artwork of Charley Harper
By Nicholas Hammond
"You know about birds. You know about art—and you actually like that stuff?" My colleague gestured toward the large posters that decorated the walls of my office. "And anyway," he sniffed, "why do you have posters with North American wildlife? This is England, for God's sake, and you work for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds."
I recall these comments made a quarter century ago to show that feelings about the work of Charles Harper have rarely been neutral. No one who noticed those posters ignored them: some were appalled by the lack of detail that rendered the birds featherless and the mammals furless. Others were delighted by the way he had reduced complex plumage patterns to geometric patterns in the style he described as "minimal realism."
One poster showed the wildlife of Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska. The focal point of interest was the fluke of a sperm whale, above which flew a swallowtail butterfly and a tufted puffin, and in front of which hovered a ruby-throated hummingbird. Near a bald eagle with a talonful of sockeye salmon, a pair of black oystercatchers probed the water's edge and a spotted sandpiper dipped its tail. How, I wondered, could everyone not be enchanted? Some of my colleagues clearly could not cope with the mathematical outlines, every line straight or circular with obtuse angles, acute angles, arcs, and chords combined to make fascinating patterns. The only natural shapes were the outlines of the maple leaves.
Another poster showed desert national parks. A cactus dominated the center of the poster with holes occupied by a Gila woodpecker, an English (house) sparrow, an aplomado falcon, and a mouse. In the foreground a roadrunner dashed toward us with the tail of a rattlesnake in its bill. In the background, where evening was falling fast, an elf owl peered from the dusk.
The posters were on my wall because their creator, Charley Harper, sent them when I had contacted him about a book I was writing about wildlife in art in the 20th century. They were large and there was no space on the walls of our house, so I took them to my office. I enjoyed the incongruity in these posters of exotic species on the walls of the office in a Victorian mansion built in the Elizabethan style sitting on a ridge overlooking the English countryside. The minimalist art was wonderfully at odds with the Old World setting.
These were not the usual photos or photo-realistic paintings. They showed angular creatures produced using mechanical drawing instruments—compasses, protractors, rulers. Charley's work was quite unlike any wildlife art I had ever seen. Nothing could be further from the realism of most of the American wildlife art in the last quarter of the past century. Charley joked that he was the only wildlife artist not to be compared to John James Audubon by the marketing people. That they didn't make this comparison shows just how little marketing people know, because there was certainly a similarity with the great man. No, Charley didn't shoot what he painted or indeed eat it after he painted it, as Audubon was alleged to do. Nor did he speak English with a French accent.
The link between Harper and Audubon is composition. The intricate designs of Audubon brought to the depiction of birds the strong compositional elements of the European botanical painters of the 18th century. And a Harper picture without strong compositional elements is unthinkable. The mathematical application of geometric shapes would be sterile. Harper was a printmaker, his medium seriography—printing with blocks of color through a silkscreen. His use of the medium was quite clever—blocks of color within geometric shapes that perfectly convey the characteristics of the animals they represent. The strong design element is composition at its best. Harper's composition is even better than that of the great Audubon.
If there was a message behind Audubon's work, it was very straightforward—that North America's birds were amazing (with a strong subtext that Audubon was pretty amazing, too). Throughout all of Charley's work there is one of two strong messages (and sometimes there are both). The first is that wildlife is wonderful, and the second is that we need to take action to make sure it survives. The great thing is that he used humor to get these messages across. A quirky sense of humor was a key part of Charley the man and Charley the artist. I have, however, found no evidence that John James had a sense of humor or even a sense of fun.
An essential of Charley's wit was wordplay. Now, I have a love-hate relationship with puns: I love my own puns but tend to hate other people's. I particularly hate it when headline writers fall back on puns, because they're almost always taking the easiest of options. Despite all this, I love Charley Harper's wordplays, but that's because they really are funny. And they are apposite. The combination of his humorous drawings and his humorous words make his book Beguiled by the Wild utterly beguiling.
Only Charley could get away with titling a print of a feeding pileated woodpecker as "Antypasto." His caption ends with the reminder: "Just remember that it rhymes with how you felt when you added him to your lifetime list—highleated." He's right. Every time I see a bird like a pileated woodpecker for the first time, I am highleated.
Charley's own favorite was a tall, narrow three-color print titled "Jesus Bugs" and showing water striders, their long, long legs ending in tiny, barely perceptible circular depressions in the surface of the water. "It's an evocation of my boyhood awakening to the joys of nature and I consider the visual event it portrays one of the most diverting in all outdoors," he wrote.
The book includes "Generation Gasp" which shows 10 black-capped chickadees seen in full-face, circles with two black triangles, capturing exactly the fierce, frowning expression of these birds. His caption is worth quoting in full, because it is such a great example of the Harper approach.
"Young black-capped chickadees grow so fast that the generation gap is only a gasp. In this family portrait, it's anyone's guess which ones are the kids. Maybe all of them are. Feeding so many beaks is such a big job that both parents have to work. Right now they're probably out hustling caterpillars while the kids hang around home, bibs in place, waiting for the groceries to arrive. Can you tell the boys from the girls? It's hard, unless, of course, you're a black-capped chickadee."
Anthropomorphism is something I usually find grating, but not when it comes from Charley, who always managed to use it without resorting to sentimentality.
As well as wordplays, Charley loved alliteration, another literary mannerism that journalists are taught to use with discretion. His "Pier Group" has six brown pelicans perched together on a pier. Graphically it is a superb piece of design, a delight for connoisseurs of composition. His philosophical caption uses alliteration to make the reader think:
"Even on a pier, peer pressure appears. Pelican or person, we all experience persistent and perpetual persuasion to perform like the pack—even if we have to stand on one foot to do it. 'I guess you'd go jump in the ocean if your pals did,' is a perennial people-parent complaint, when the commendation of contemporaries precludes progenitorial approval. And that's just what a pubescent pelican does with his peers on the pier: jumps in the ocean."
So beguiled am I by Charley's work that I could fill pages with descriptions of his clever pictures of ruddy turnstones, bald eagles, ladybugs, herons, wood ducks, raccoons (he loved raccoons as subjects), and whales. I shall limit my self-indulgence and refer to just one more print.
This print features a North American species for which I feel particular affection, because it was the first bird I saw when I landed at JFK on my first visit to the States more than 25 years ago. It is the mourning dove, the subject of "Lovey Dovey," the caption to which employs puns, alliteration, and anthropomorphism in spades:
"Long distance is the nest best thing to being there, but a dove in love would rather reach out and touch someone. Spring is in the air and all the lines are busy with local calls as the wooing and cooing commence.
HELLO, LOVEY, THIS IS DOVEY.
Fly away, buster, you've got a wrong number.
Dauntless Dovey dials some different digits.
HELLO, LOVEY, THIS IS DOV—
Dovey! I thought you'd never call!
Come on over and let's get acquainted—person to person."
It is always a risk to meet in the flesh someone whose work you admire. Once I interviewed my favorite author and thought he was rather silly, and I don't think I have read a word of his since. Thus it was that I approached meeting Charley Harper with some trepidation, despite being assured by the editor of this very journal that I would think Charley was great. And of course the editor was right (note to editor: aren't you always?). Our meeting took place 10 years ago, when we were both speakers at the Midwest Birding Symposium on Lake Erie. We liked each other immediately and he kindly inscribed a copy of Beguiled by the Wild. We looked forward to meeting again at a similar gathering, but we never did and sadly we shall never have that meeting.
Not only did I want to talk to him about his work, but I wanted to talk to him about his experiences in Europe in World War II. I imagine this GI learning to sketch quickly between mortar barrages as his infantry reconnaissance platoon fought its way into Europe at the vanguard of the Allied advance. I would have liked to thank him for his contribution to enabling me to grow up in peace and freedom.
I would liked to have asked him more about his work before he turned to the style he described as "minimal realism" in the 1950s, never counting the feathers, just counting the wings. He said he was so into realism in art school that he painted highlights on hairs.
"Now I avoid linear perspective, which penetrates the plane," he wrote. "I eliminate light and shade, which fragment the plane, because they are transitory, constantly shifting, and have nothing to do with the true form of an object, which exists unchanged by either the presence or absence of light."
Here is another paradox. If I were to read that sentence in the context of any art other than Charley's, I think I would take issue with every single word. For me, capturing light and shade is the essence of two-dimensional art. And yet Charley ignored them completely and I still love his work.
The truth is that Charley was unique. It could be argued that no other artist has made such a powerful case for conservation, and certainly none has attempted his minimal realism. Now why didn't I think of that 20 years ago when I was being taken to task for liking anything so strange?
Nicholas Hammond is a naturalist, author, and lecturer who has been a lifelong student of wildlife art.
