After a childhood spent running from every creature that skittered about on more than four legs, Marley has devoted much of his adult life to studying bugs-with increasing fascination. He makes frequent forays to remote locations far removed from his home in Oregon, seeking out the most beautiful and exotic species on Earth.
The more than 170 color photographs in Pheremone will appeal to anyone intrigued by dazzling design, beautiful bugs, entomology, or all three. Accompanying the broad sample of Marley's work is a series of essays by the artist: "Design of Insects," "Insects in Design," "History," "Color," "The Coleoptera Mosaics: An Exercise in Color," "Repetition," "Structure," "Texture," "Variations," "Botanicals," "Size," and"Environmental Effects."
Christopher Marley was born in Covina, California, and grew up near Salem, Oregon. At 19 years old, he began his travels while serving as a missionary for two years in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Upon his return, he balanced studying design at Brigham Young University with extended sabbaticals to work both on and off camera for scores of fashion brands such as Donna Karan, Gucci, and Giorgio Armani. Over more than a decade, his assignments to dozens of countries in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas spawned a passionate drive to share the unending variety of surprising natural artifacts with an unsuspecting public through his artwork. In addition to insects, his mediums of design include fossils, minerals, botanicals, bones, and sea life. His work has been featured in numerous magazines and is sold through hundreds of galleries, stores, and showrooms in the United States and abroad.
This magnum opus presents a comprehensive array of the works of the world's leading bug artist.
Christopher Marley sets out the philosophy of design that informs his work.
Leafing through the book takes you on a guided tour of the globe's most exotic bugs.
The colors are entirely natural, and to render the reproductions as accurate as possible some have been reproduced with fifth-color metallic inks and highlighted with spot varnish.
'Pheromones are chemical stimulants that insects release to attract one another -- and they've been known to seduce the occasional human, too.' So Christopher Marley states about the chosen title of this fascinating, challenging and very beautiful book of excellent color reproductions of his art: his art is the preservation and design of mounting insects as the objects d'art. Marley is obsessed (in a good way) with the beauty of the 'Phylum ARTHROPODA, which is divided into a number of classes of which insects belong to the class INSECTA. Insects are classified into Orders based on certain characteristics, some of the larger Orders are Coleoptera - beetles, Diptera - flies, Lepidoptera - butterflies and moths. The various Orders are in turn, again broken down into Families ( and sometimes sub-families ) then into Genus and finally species. A particular insect is always referred to by its Genus and species, but for general purposes the Order or Family is normally quite acceptable.' Yes, for Marley this scientific information is important and with each of the insects he approaches in this extravagantly illustrated book he obeys this order of classification.
But that is all on the scientific level - a level that makes this book far more than a monograph on the art of Christopher Marley. The range of colors and shapes and bizarre aspects of insects recovered form around the globe is staggering and there are no two 'images' that appear the same. Other great artists, such as Jacquelyn McBain, have devoted much of their artistic career to exploring the beauty of insects: in McBain's case she also celebrates the flora on which these insects dwell and survive in paintings rich in observed accuracy and fascinatingly coupled with metaphorical titles and ideas. But Christopher Marley lets the beauties of the insects speak for themselves. While the book is a work of art in itself, it only suggests the amazing virtuosity of color and arrangement of his works as they hang in galleries and showrooms. He is a gifted artist, one who deserves wider attention than from just those who appreciate entomology. Highly recommended for everyone's library.
Grady Harp
Overview