Clayton Harper's art studio. If 500 monkeys with typewriters could come up with Hamlet, then perhaps 500 with paintbrushes could create a Picasso.
Clayton Harper studied Fine Art, Art History and Art Education at the University of Denver and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. After a successful marketing career in book publishing, he has returned to art making with an emphasis on landscape and cityscape painting in watercolor. He works both in studio and directly from nature. His deep bonds to the outdoors were formed during a youth spent in Australia. Travels all over the world have strongly influenced his interest in the varieties of built environments that people call home. The challenges of watercolor - with it’s unforgiving, technique-dependent mysteries and it’s unique ability to capture light - are well-suited to his vision.
On landscape painting:
“My style is often fairly loose and direct, relying on a lifetime of drawing and close observation to capture the essence of what I see and feel, and to evoke the serendipity of color, texture and form in the world around me. In the studio I frequently work from photographs. There, the first challenge is to break through the photo plane and inhabit the landscape in a painterly manner. In both instances I want to be as fully ‘in the place’ as I can be, even if I’ve never physically been there. Editing with a selective eye for detail while forming a tight connection between my eye and my brush are always the keys to what I’m after – communicating as best I can the way it feels to experience a place.”
Influences:
John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, and the Australian master Fred Williams have all been important to my landscape painting. My grandmother Margaret Mitchell and mother Cam Harper were both painters and my debt to them is enormous. I also find it helpful in the studio to be listening to Mississippi John Hurt, Muddy Waters, The Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, Beethoven, Bach and Wilco much of the time.
