NICHOLAS HARPER FINE ART
“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
- Edgar Allan Poe
ABOUT NICHOLAS HARPER
My journey as an artist began at the age of five on the evening my father passed away in his sleep.
My mother woke me at 3am to tell me the news. A single fading balloon hovered in the corner from my birthday the week prior. It hung in a liminal space while struggling to resist the pull of gravity, and ultimately, it's fate.
This singular moment set me on a path distinct from my friends as I found myself to be "the other" or a person on the outside looking in. Turning inward, I watched and observed, deciphered and decoded life, as much as I participated in it.
While the lens through which I viewed the word was forever clouded with the realities of death and temporarily, so to was it magnified by an appreciation for the moment and for the beauty that surrounds us in our daily lives. From the mundane to the extraordinary, I have been constantly captivated by the mysteries of our existence and am regularly overwhelmed, as well as inspired by, its beauty.
It's from this emotional and psychological vantage point that I have sought to carve out my place in the art world. Within my portraits I strive to create works wrought with the potential for allegory and story telling, borrowing inspiration from the poets and authors of magical realism literature and the past masters of Orthodox Iconography and classical art traditions. Common themes explored within my portraits include The Divine, the existence and nature of Soul and the mystical and mysterious nature of existence.
In the spirit of finding beauty and my desire to continually be artistically reborn, my creative spirit has given rise to the exploration of nature through what I refer to as Ambient Landscapes or Nocturnes.
Born out of the tradition of Romanticism, my inherent distrust of technology and an aversion to much of what modernity elevates as “sacred” and “holy”, within these Nocturnes, I turn my attention toward the natural world. Rather than documenting what I experience on frequent hikes through state parks during the twilight hours, my goal is to capture and portray the emotional imprints these solitary moments conjure within.
After being ejected from my artist co-op in 1999, I opened The Rogue Buddha Gallery to facilitate a cross-disciplinary exhibition program that combined two and three-dimensional exhibits with dance, theater, film, music and the literary arts. I have creatively contributed to, and immersed myself in, most of these fields to one extent or another.
In addition to running the Rogue Buddha Gallery and creating my personal artwork, I am an avid collector of beautifully bizarre artwork, sporadically publish an arts journal, Amorous Vespertine, create melancholic electronic soundscapes under the moniker Bleak Paris and from time to time release new episodes of the Art Wunderful Podcast.
Art is much more than placing paint on panel, it's a mindset, a distinctive approach to life itself. Perhaps more than anything, it's a journey and an exploration both inward and outward, through life's experiences and into ones soul. Ultimately, ones art is a projection of those life experiences and the emotional, psychological and spiritual imprints they leave upon the artist soul. When one falls in love with a painting, they do so because they recognize something of their own self in the work, perhaps a part of them they were unaware of before, and this is where the excitement of art appreciation lies. Plainly spoken, art is about souls touching souls.