Coming from the 85-year-old artist and illustrator Charley Harper, "Model Ts are very insect-like" is a telling affirmation. For a man who defines creativity as the ability to connect two things that never seemed to go together before, it's proof that he's still got it. Further evidence comes in Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life (AMMO Books, $400), compiled by the designer, and longtime Harper fan, Todd Oldham. This lavish special-edition monograph—each is equipped with an original silkscreen print—showcases a career spanning more than half a century: from wildlife so wondrous that even bored bio students paid attention in The Giant Golden Book of Biology (1961) and The Animal Kingdom (1968) to the round-face owls and boastful blue jays nesting in the pages of the long-extinct Ford Times magazine.

Harper's version of the natural world—his birds alone would have to earn him the title of midcentury Audubon—is full of origamic glories rendered with precise brushstrokes, an unerring eye for color, and a mischievous sense of humor. But anthropomorphism has never been in Harper's bag of tricks. "I guess it comes from an impulse to be honest about everything instead of glorifying it or making it pretty," says the Cincinnati-based artist, whose work has a way of serendipitously revealing the secret behind the subject—without resorting to, say, pouty lips on a blowfish or long eyelashes on a ladybug. Harper's realism is rooted in a childhood spent on a hardscrabble West Virginia farm, where he would watch water striders (sometimes called Jesus Bugs) casting their indelible shadows on streambeds. In his hands, cardinals are crafted seamlessly from tear-shaped bodies and triangle beaks, while a caterpillar-crazed rooster catches the eye with razor-sharp angles. But Harper has achieved more than giving us a new way of seeing wildlife. As a devoted conservationist, whose oeuvre includes posters celebrating everything from "Biodiversity in the Burbs" to the Cape May Bird Observatory (his most recent), he has also given it longevity.—LIZ MCDANIEL

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