The long awaited book finally arrived on Friday and all I can say is wow. This book lived up to all the expectation I had for it. It is enormous. I think it now takes the award for my biggest book. And bigger isn’t always better but in this case, it sure is. This book is about two inches thick full of Charley’s works. I posted abut Charley before here, so you must know how amazing I think his work is. He was also extremely prolific. Todd Oldham, the editor, says this book is only full of Charley’s A+++ work but that there’s tons of more work that’s A++ and A+ too that he would someday like to edit for another book. Listen to some of these stats- he painted hundreds of works, created over 105,000 pieces for advertising and promotional art, printed hundreds of silkscreens, made four large scale projects(murals and mosaics), designed over 50 ecological posters, contributed over 400 paintings to Ford Times Magazine and illustrated many books. I love this interview between Todd and Charley in the book. Charley admits he picked the art school he went to by the photo of the girl on the cover of the brochure. But that upper-classman girl paid him no attention when he got there, but he did meet his wife Edie on his the first day. Todd asks him a load of questions about his life but he also asks him some more general art opinion questions. It interested me what he said about computers in today’s commercial art- “There are a lot of possibilities with computers and art that we didn’t have. But I think it’s discouraged a lot of people from developing their own direction with art because it’s so easy to do it on the computer. And it tends to look much like most other computer art when you do that, I think.” It’s so funny because I think some of Charley’s works are so precise and flat that they almost look like they were done on a computer. I wonder if his work would have been the same had he grown-up in the digital design age and would he be using Adobe Illustrator to create his work, or would he have done something totally different. My favorite part of this book is all the commercial work that’s in it. I hadn’t seen so much of it before. The poster section is probably my favorite. His posters tend to have a ton of animals in them filling all the space in a pleasing pattern. The mosaics are also pretty incredible. His illustrations are so geometric already, they naturally looked perfect made of units of tiny squares. To be honest, I can not think of a better way to spend 200 dollars. It’s really well worth the money and easy to justify once you are turning the pages. Get this book here or a limited edition with a print here.

© Julia Rothman 2007