Cristall Harper | An Unhurried Path - Southwest Art Magazine

Cristall Harper’s dogscapes, seascapes, and floral paintings are the result of having time to grow

By Gussie Fauntleroy

Cristall Harper, Heaven, oil, 36 x 36.

This story was featured in the May 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art May 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

Most people, looking back on a career, tend to cite the small successes that nudged them forward—the little confidence-builders and positive experiences that felt like encouraging pats on the back. Cristall Harper takes a different view. “I’m where I am today because I survived a series of failures,” she says, smiling. The first one was right out of the gate, at what should have been the culmination of her college career. After four years of working toward a bachelor’s degree in painting at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT, she received a failing grade for her senior show. So she stayed at BYU for an additional semester to create another senior show. This time, she passed.

Yet even after her 2002 graduation, Harper felt unprepared to offer the world a distinctive visual voice. In part, she sees that as a consequence of classes that favored talking about art more than making art. “I was lost,” she remembers. “There were seeds of originality, but when you’re not doing a lot of painting, you’re not figuring out who you are.”

: Cristall Harper, Cowgirl, oil, 15 x 15.

: Cristall Harper, Firelight, oil, 24 x 30.

: Cristall Harper, Midas Touch, oil, 36 x 36.

Still, after selling her work for several years through frame shops, boutiques, and on eBay, she’d been invited to join her first “real” gallery. But just as she thought things were looking up came what she saw as another epic failure: After a few months, she was asked to retrieve all her paintings because none had sold. Some artists may have retreated into discouragement at this point, perhaps quitting painting. Instead, Harper took advantage of the slow opening of her career door by making sure her art was ready when it came time to step through. During this time she held a variety of day jobs while putting in hours at the easel after work each day.

In 2007 she made the decision to step into the unknown. She walked away from a salaried teaching job to focus on her art. And she painted anything that caught her eye: the horse across the road, the little pumpkin on her windowsill, a rising thunderstorm. She credits her husband, Matt, with nonstop encouragement that included making sure they rented two-bedroom apartments so she would have a place to paint. “The whole time I was asking myself: What do I want to paint? What’s my style?” she says. “I’m a firm believer that those answers can’t be rushed. They get here when they get here.”

And they got here. At 40, Harper exudes enthusiasm and confidence, as well as gratitude for a life that checks all the boxes she could want: painting full time, refining and exploring an exciting style that feels like her own, and focusing on subject matter she loves—flowers, the sea, and especially dogs. She recently concluded her second major show at Gallery MAR in Park City, UT, and she enjoys a quickly growing national collector base. “It’s a dream come true,” she says.

: Cristall Harper, Squish, oil, 20 x 30.

: Cristall Harper, Star Trail, oil, 48 x 72.

: Cristall Harper, Summer Camp, oil, 15 x 15.

A significant step toward that dream took place in 2009, when Harper attended a tulip festival at Ashton Gardens in Lehi, UT. The experience produced a bounty of paintings and led to her first show at Terra Nova Gallery in Provo (now closed), consisting entirely of tulip imagery. It also reconnected her with the important role of flowers, and beauty in general, in her early life. As a child in Columbia, MO, she often studied the stained-glass irises in a window at her father’s dental office. She observed her father as he puttered in his flower gardens. She remembers sitting on the floor at home at age 10, staring up at a large painting of a lily and wondering how the artist got it to look backlit.

A deep appreciation of natural beauty was also cultivated on family road trips each summer, which went everywhere from the California coast to Washington, DC. Staring out the car window for hours at the ever-changing landscape, Harper internalized visual elements that later became essential aspects of her art, including shape, atmosphere, color temperature, and light. “I really think my gift is that I can see,” she says. “I see beauty, and art is how I curate and share that.”

With excellent art education in junior high and high school—in particular with teacher Cynthia McCord, who encouraged, inspired, and challenged her—Harper knew, by her late teens, that painting would be her career choice. Almost immediately after entering BYU, however, her talent and confidence seemed to shrink in comparison with other students. Meanwhile, the school’s painting program was not ideally suited to her needs. Yet despite a rocky start, after graduation she hustled, as she puts it, determined to teach herself what she needed to know by putting “miles on the brush.”

: Cristall Harper, Burnt, oil, 5 x 7.

: Cristall Harper, Another Beginning, oil, 8 x 12.

: Cristall Harper, Violeta, oil, 5 x 7.

Then came Buttercup. The yellow lab puppy bounded into Harper’s life and taught her who she was as an artist. She began creating small paintings of Buttercup as part of her daily easel practice. In 2012 she contacted Gallery MAR, suggesting they look at her website and thinking they might be interested in her floral work. The call that came back surprised her. Could she send a few 6-by-6-inch paintings of dogs? The gallery sold three the first week. “We were off to the races,” Harper says. Four years later Greg Fulton, managing partner at Astoria Fine Art in Jackson, WY, emailed Harper. He’d been following her work for a couple of years after purchasing one of her paintings of Buttercup and invited her to join the gallery. In 2018 she was honored with her first solo show at Astoria.

Buttercup provided companionship and artistic inspiration for 10 years, during which time Harper also began painting other dogs (and occasionally other animals). At first these were close-up portraits expressing the dog’s personality. On a wall in her office hangs COWGIRL, a portrait of a smiling Buttercup, her tongue hanging out and a bright red bandana around her neck. It’s a daily reminder not only of the “best dog ever,” but also of the style and subject that kick-started her success. The image is painted alla prima (wet on wet) in oils and composed of subtle geometric color shapes. The result reminds Harper of the stained-glass art she admired as a child.

: Cristall Harper, Deep Summer Sun, oil, 32 x 52.

: Cristall Harper, George, oil, 12 x 12.

: Cristall Harper, Ember, oil, 5 x 7.

Later Harper expanded her imagery to include context, which frequently meant dogs swimming in water or frolicking through meadows of flowers or tall grass. She loves the word a friend coined for this latter approach: “dogscapes.” Among the first of these was STAR TRAIL, depicting Buttercup leaving a bright, sparkling wake as she swims in a lake. The initial shift to placing dogs in an environment “just happened,” the artist says. “It came out of my hands. I feel like my brain already understood how to paint water.”

With the dogscapes, Harper also expanded her toolbox to add acrylics, ink, and colored pencil, applying and manipulating color with sandpaper and palette knives. “I love it all,” she says. She finishes this type of painting with oil, adding highlights like the reflections on water or glints of sunshine on a dog’s face. It’s all part of an approach she describes as “representational but delicious,” referring to elements that are abstract up close but seem to sharpen into focus from a distance. “The paint is not overmanipulated or controlled, it’s alive,” she says. “When I’m making the abstract marks, I get to be the inventor. I work beyond the photo reference, and that’s satisfying.”

: Cristall Harper, Happy to be Myself, oil, 24 x 12.

: Cristall Harper, I Am Encircled & Mighty, oil, 48 x 72.

: Cristall Harper, Primavera, oil, 8 x 8.

When Cristall and Matt moved to American Fork, south of Salt Lake City, in 2005, she painted in an attic that was cramped and stiflingly hot in the summer. For three years she gave art lessons, saving money to transform a backyard building into her current studio. Today part of the building is Matt’s woodworking shop, where he makes her panels and frames. Harper’s studio has leafy backyard views, a wide covered porch with a hammock, and a quick commute from the house. It’s exactly where she wants to spend her days.

While the majority of Harper’s art these days involves animals, she is also bringing in more floral imagery this year. The spring saw her carrying her camera and extra batteries everywhere she went, having scouted out trees and gardens that promised glorious blooms. Seascapes, both from photos and imagination, also provide an opportunity to convey nature’s power to evoke emotion. Harper’s family roots are in Yugoslavia, and this ancestral connection to the Adriatic Sea adds poignancy and depth to her love of the sea. “I feel like my seascapes and florals are getting better and gaining traction and will eventually find the right gallery,” she says.

Reflecting on her artistic development over the years, Harper keeps returning to an appreciation for the unhurried path. “I love thinking of myself as a tree,” she says. “I’m growing roots, and I want real fruit. I want organic growth in my career.” That includes careful consideration of venues for her work—even when, as recently happened, she declines invitations to join galleries that don’t feel like the perfect fit. “I’m so satisfied with my process,” she says. “I spent 17 years searching and painting, and now I know who I am.”

representation
Astoria Fine Art, Jackson, WY; Gallery MAR, Park City, UT; Four-Square ART, www.foursquareart.com; www.cristallharper.com.