BEGUILED BY THE WILD: THE ART OF CHARLEY HARPER
Charley Harper, Roger Caras [introduction]
Charley Harper, Roger Caras [introduction]: BEGUILED BY THE WILD: THE ART OF CHARLEY HARPER. Flower Valley Press, Gaithersburg, MD, 1994. First edition, second printing. Sq. quarto. Embossed brown cloth decorated in white. Printed dust jacket. Decorated endpapers. 132 pp. 117 color plates. Cloth edges gently pushed. Dust jacket lightly edgeworn along top and bottom edges. Book design by Charley Harper. A nearly fine copy in a very good or better dust jacket.
11.75 x 11.75 hardcover book with 132 pages and 117 full-page color plates by Charley Harper.
This book showcases Charley Harper's not so wild, "wild" animals. They consist mostly of paintings of small birds and animals, which live in an eat-or-be-eaten world. Though they live in a harsh world, when not in immediate danger, they are wonderful to behold, and Charley Harper shows them in a way they've never been seen before. His captions are as captivating as his paintings. His caption for the cover photo, "Serengeti Spaghetti," reads, "If you experience technical difficulties as you look at this herd of zebras on Africa's Serengeti Plain, please bear with us -- the trouble is not in your set. It's a tropical optical illusion, an equatorial pictorial puzzle of equivocal equinal elements, an amorphous ambulatory aggregation of undulating ungulates: op art on the hoof. How many hooves in the herd? You really want to know? Well, first you have to count the zebras."
If some of Charley Harper's work looks familiar to you, it just may be. Charley Harper has done numerous posters for the National Park Service. His paintings are easily adaptable to needlework, quilting, woodworking, and jewelry.
Charley Harper's (1922-2007) life-long love of nature inspired his work in this wonderful collection entitled "Beguiled by the Wild." Harper was best known for his highly stylized wildlife prints, posters and book illustrations. He called his style "minimal realism," capturing the essence of his subjects with the fewest possible visual elements. Using graphic shapes and bold colors, Harper distilled and simplified complex elements.