About Digital Restoration Artist Vincent Lexington Harper

The world’s largest collection of digitally restored vintage posters is not a distinction taken lightly by the artist, Vincent Lexington Harper. Consuming 14 months and over 5,000 hours of diligent painstaking work to accomplish, this collection is remarkable in that it spans two decades, three countries, and an awful lot of history in between. Yet, the sole artist responsible for this historical perspective and preservation effort did it entirely on his own, for no financial reward and scarcely little recognition, toiling yearlong, the winter months in an office without heat, for the love of a lost art form, and the chance to rescue it from obscurity and extinction.

The Artist, Archivist and Copyright Holder of the entire collection, got his start in graphics with a stint as a U.S. Army Draftsman and Illustrator with the 4th Infantry Division, G-1 Intelligence Unit. The focus of his current career is still in the graphics and communications field, but his undying and unpaid passion has been his selfless dedication to the preservation of early advertising or commercial art, feeling it warrants much more respect than given by the art world.

It is the sincere wish of the Artist that this body of work be preserved, frozen in time by its very restoration, in order that it might be enjoyed by future generations of art lovers everywhere. Not only those familiar with advertising art but also those never before exposed to it. The majority of these originals are long extinct, lost, destroyed, or confiscated during the Chinese cultural revolution as being corrupt western influences, never to be seen again. Largely all that remain today are copies of older copies, in poor and damaged condition, and even those are becoming impossible to locate. In 2002, Vincent made a decision to restore the entire collection of posters, for the same reason that people who care about the early cinema classics are now scrambling to rescue the rest of the great Hollywood movies before there are nothing but cans of crumbling celluloid remaining. P. Korlac, 2004

Please address any inquiries to: restoredtreasures@yahoo.com