Doodle Dream Studio is my family’s concerted and heartfelt tribute to my paternal grandfather, Charles L. Massey, and the utterly unique but thus far little known Mid Century Modern art he created during his lifetime.   

Known as Charlie to friends and Pop to family, my grandfather fused his artistic bent with his work at the defense contracting company General Dynamics in Fort Worth, Texas beginning in the 1950s, amid a rash of UFO sightings that stunned the nation.  From there he worked his way up via a promotion to the New York headquarters before transferring to San Diego, California in 1970 as Comptroller of the General Dynamics and Convair Aerospace plant based there.   

Charlie doodled, as he phrased it, constantly while conducting business, particularly while on the phone.  My Dad, Charlie’s son Warren, says that his father used the complex designs he created to map out solutions to business related issues that he dealt with on a daily basis at General Dynamics.  Over time Charlie’s wife, my grandmother Pinky, saved hundreds of original drawings in manilla file folders which were eventually passed on to me, their only granddaughter, in my capacity as the unofficial Massey family archivist.  My grandfather’s art is sketched out on sheaves of graph paper, vintage restaurant napkins and paper placemats, even the backs of paper plates, and every single creative vision is a vibrant testament to the era he lived in and the experiences he had throughout his career during the sudden surge in aerospace technology development at that time in United States history.

My name is Heather Massey, and my background is in art and graphic design.  I am thrilled to be able to share my grandfather's  amazing and unusual art with the world.  I have spent years pouring over his drawings and the few oil paintings he produced later in life, contemplating what might have fueled the spectacular and surreal figures that Charlie’s imagination sparked into being onto paper and canvas.  He used a variety of mediums, including colored pencil, magic marker, and paint, to create fantastical creatures and futuristic flying ships with effortless ease and few if any errors.  

My part in presenting his art is primarily technical in nature.  I scan his drawings in high resolution, and then I digitally remove any surrounding extraneous background.  The NFTs, in color by Charlie's own hand, are each placed against a vibrantly colored digital canvas.  When Charlie turned his drawings into oil paintings, he always set them against color backgrounds.  Finally I place his digitized signature in the lower right corner of the piece.  It is my hope that the end result is as close as possible to how my grandfather would have presented it himself.  Purchased NFTs will be accompanied by a matching canvas print as a physical bonus.

Those few who have been invited to view a work of art by my grandfather all saw something different and had different interpretations of what they were seeing, but the fascination, visual delight, and intellectual engagement they describe seems universal.  Charlie’s unique and authentically original Mid Century Modern art is part of his great legacy to my family, and it is our pleasure to share it with you at OpenSea.io/doodledreamstudio.