Some designs arrive at the Tileworks already knowing what they want to be. Charley Harper’s work was like that.
When the first Harper tile took shape here—the 6x6 Upside Downside—it didn’t feel like an experiment—it felt like a beginning. The image moved from paper to clay without losing its nerve. The lines held. The humor stayed dry. Nothing softened, nothing got precious. The tile trusted the intelligence of the original drawing, and it trusted the intelligence of the person looking at it.
Harper’s Upside Downside explores balance, symmetry, and visual wit.
For Brett Harper, Charley and Edie Harper’s son and the steward of their legacy at the Charley Harper Art Studio, that trust is the whole thing. Charley (1922–2007) built a body of work that continues to find new life well beyond his lifetime.
From the start, Brett has been clear that the question was never whether his father’s work could become tile. It was who should do it—and whether they understood what they were being handed.
“There was another ceramic company that approached us early on,” Brett said. “They only wanted to do one design.” More importantly, he said, “it wasn’t really a licensing arrangement—it was more like, ‘We’ll give you some tiles.’”
Free tiles might sound generous. But Brett was already thinking longer-term. “That didn’t really benefit the studio,” he said. What the Charley Harper Art Studio needed was a real partnership—one that respected the work as intellectual property and generated ongoing support. “So I wasn’t sure that was a really good partnership,” he said.
Instead of rushing into something easy and local, the studio stepped back. A former licensing agent identified Motawi and recommended it as a better opportunity.
What they were looking for wasn’t just production quality. It was alignment—and reach.
Another reason Motawi rose to the top, Brett said, was distribution. The company already had a strong presence in museum stores and gift shops across the country, giving the work a broader audience from the start.
Motawi stood out quickly. “Your company was just the better fit for us,” Brett said. “It was more established.”
But there was another detail that mattered a great deal to him. “You were already licensing Frank Lloyd Wright,” Brett said.
Motawi’s Wright tiles reflect the modernist clarity Brett recognized in Harper’s work.
That wasn’t incidental. Wright represents a body of work where proportion, geometry, and restraint are everything. Seeing those designs translated into clay signaled to Brett that Motawi understood how to handle modernist work without losing its structure. “That told me you knew how to handle legacy work,” he said.
“You had more contemporary kinds of licensees,” Brett added. The work wasn’t being framed as something to look back at, but something to live with now and in the future.
At about the same time, something similar was happening on our end.
Nawal Motawi remembers coming across Charley Harper’s work through Pomegranate Press (which produces Motawi’s calendars)—one of those moments where you stop and look twice. The designs felt immediately familiar, even in a different medium. The forms were already doing what tile asks for: bold shapes, clearly defined edges, and a sense of movement held in place. With Motawi’s Cuenca technique—where glaze is contained by raised lines—the translation felt almost built in.
What Nawal saw wasn’t just a beautiful image. It was a fit. If Harper’s work was being licensed, she figured, then someone must be stewarding it. She had our licensing contact reach out.
And somewhere in that overlap—Brett looking for the right partner, Nawal recognizing the right work—the connection was made.
To this day, no one can say for sure who contacted whom first.
Harper’s work has always been forward-facing.
Starting with the right tile
The choice of Upside Downside set the tone for everything that followed. “That’s been a very popular print for many years,” Brett said, but more than popularity, it carried Charley’s whole way of thinking—reduction, geometry, balance, and a quiet joke embedded in structure.
The birds aren’t just cutesy. They’re composed. The design trusts the viewer to meet it halfway. “That one really made sense to start with,” Brett said.
From there, the work began to unfold naturally—drawing and clay in conversation, each holding its ground.
In Redbird Romance, the move from lithograph to tile keeps the lines crisp and the structure intact.
Why Harper works so well in tile
People often describe Charley Harper’s work as simple. Brett doesn’t.
“He didn’t want to be realistic,” he said, “because if he was realistic, then his art would look like everybody else’s.”
Charley described his own work as “minimal realism.” Instead, he built a visual language that could hold almost any subject while remaining unmistakably his. Birds, mammals, insects, landscapes—all filtered through the same logic.
“He used drafting tools,” Brett said. “French curve, compass, protractor, all of that.”
Those tools brought consistency, not stiffness. “Each time he would do a picture using those tools,” Brett said, “it would render the same kind of simplified look.”
Charley had his own shorthand for the approach. “Charley would call it ‘Thinking flat and funny,’” Brett said.
That phrase translates especially well in tile. The medium rewards clarity—strong silhouettes and clean color separations, forms that hold up under glaze and light. Humor, when it’s there, lives inside the structure.
Harper was already working that way on paper.
Watching the work get made
Brett didn’t learn this philosophy in retrospect. He grew up watching it happen.
“The earliest that I saw was when Charley was silk screening in his in-laws’ basement,” he said. Ink. Screens. Repetition. Patience.
Charley worked in gouache early on, later transitioning to Liquitex acrylic paint as it became available to him.
That memory hits close to home at Motawi, where the work still unfolds one layer at a time—making art through process. Clay pressed. Edges smoothed. Glaze mixed. Tiles loaded and unloaded. Nothing is rushed.
There’s another story Brett often shares when explaining why Charley worked the way he did. On his honeymoon, Brett said, Charley stood at the Grand Canyon and realized something fundamental. “There’s no way in the world I can paint that and capture the magnitude of it,” he said.
At the edge of the canyon, he looked back at the canvas and painted what remained in his mind’s eye.
From that point on, the work wasn’t about copying nature. It was about understanding it, then rebuilding it in a visual language that felt true—reduced to its essence.
Stewardship, and keeping the work in motion
Brett doesn’t talk about his father’s work as a closed chapter. “He asked me if I would continue people’s familiarity and appreciation of his art,” Brett said.
That request carried purpose. “His environmental message too,” he added.
In works like Scary Scenario, Harper engages environmental themes like global warming.
The animals Charley drew weren’t just formal exercises. They carried ideas about habitat, balance, and interdependence—ideas that continue to resonate.
Structure matters here. Licensing, done well, keeps the work moving—into homes, into new contexts, into new conversations. “This actually benefits the studio,” Brett said, describing the Motawi relationship, which supports that work while keeping it active and visible.
The art of distillation
Working with the Harper archive still produces moments of discovery.
“I’ll give an example,” Brett said. “One that’s new and very popular so far is the Bat.”
The Bat tile comes from a much larger composition—the painting Bat, Bullfrog and Campfire. It wasn’t an obvious choice. “I wouldn’t have thought of just the bat,” Brett said.
What stood out to him was the edit itself. “She extracted that element from the picture,” he said, referring to Nawal Motawi. “She’s good at isolating something for a really quick visual reaction—and it looks like fine art, too.”
That instinct shows up again in another example we often share on Tileworks tours: the 6x6 October and 6x6 Autumn Edibles tiles. Both began life together in a single Harper artwork, October Edibles.
The skill shows up in what happens next.
Rather than reproducing the full scene, Nawal separated the animals into two independent tiles—each complete in itself. “That’s the kind of thing I really admire,” Brett said. “Taking one piece of artwork and understanding how it can become two.”
Each tile holds its own space, while still carrying the DNA of the original work. “That’s knowing what you’re looking at,” Brett said.
Living with Harper
Brett is clear-eyed about how people actually encounter art at home.
“I like the subways too,” he said.
Smaller formats aren’t a compromise. They’re often the way in. “The little subway tiles give a customer very affordable tile,” Brett said, and from there, he sees something else happen. “It’s something that lets them grow into the larger ones.”
Many collectors also display the tiles in stands, placing them on shelves alongside family photos and other meaningful objects.
One tile becomes two. Two become a short run along a backsplash. Over time, Harper becomes part of daily life.
“There’s that whimsy,” Brett said. “That little bit of joy.”
A living legacy
What’s striking now is how much of Charley Harper’s work continues to move—well beyond the studio where it began.
Brett spoke about recent and upcoming exhibitions that place both Charley and Edie Harper back into public view, not as a retrospective curiosity, but as working, relevant artists. Two major retrospective exhibitions in Cincinnati will open in October, and can be seen in a single day—the museums are just a few miles apart.
For Brett, those moments matter.
They extend the conversation beyond prints and products, into spaces where the work can be seen at scale again—on walls, in context, and in dialogue with other artists. They also reinforce something he’s been working toward all along: a fuller picture of the Harper legacy, one that includes both of his parents, and the life they built around making art.
At Motawi, that same idea plays out differently, but with the same intent. The work continues to move—into kitchens, bathrooms, fireplace surrounds. Into the spaces where people live.
And that story isn’t finished. As Brett continues to shape the Harper legacy—on walls, in exhibitions, and in the work itself—Edie Harper’s voice is coming forward as well. Her work is finding new attention, and, here at Motawi, new life in clay.
We’ll be sharing more of that story soon. Watch this space.
