What is the meaning of life and who or what are we as human beings?

These are the questions I began to ask myself one week after my fifth birthday, on the evening my father passed away in his sleep.  Since that time, I have been endlessly curious about the mysterious nature of existence, especially as it pertains to the nature of Self and Soul.

While sometimes overwhelmed by the sublime beauty that surrounds us, from the mundane to the extraordinary, I am endlessly fascinated by our world and the mysteries that shroud it.

 It was this fascination and quest for meaning and understanding that initially led me to bring a fine tipped pencil to the smooth tooth of blank paper as a child. By carving out my own realities in two dimensions, I better hoped to understand the world while perhaps simultaneously, escaping from its harsher realities, at least for a short while.

Therein lies the irony and magic of art, it's ability to provide solace as well as discomfort, to illicit tremendously powerful and contrasting emotions, from joy and love to deep and great sorrow.

While art doesn't necessarily offer any answers to the great mysteries of life by means of logic or reason, it can deepen the mystery. In so doing, through an appreciation of these mysteries, perhaps that is where we add richness and find meaning to life. It's with this understanding that art becomes a reflection of the human experience.

Art is the story of the human Soul.

While my fathers passing was not easy and forever skewed the lens by which I view and experience the world, it provided me with the greatest gift possible, an appreciation for it and a desire to take part in the act of creation myself.

It's from this emotional and psychological vantage point that I have sought to carve out my place in the art world. While paying homage to beauty as a requisite principle of life, I endeavor to create works wrought with the potential for allegory and story telling, to illicit memory dreams both real and imagined and to offer windows to the Soul, both mine and yours.

- Nicholas Harper