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Cristall Harper’s oil paintings are memorable, bold and beloved! She is most-known for her animal portraits. Her preferred painting method is alla prima, and her work is realistic from far away but very exciting and abstract up close. One critic described her personal version of abstraction as “beautifully rooted in reality,” while Southwest Art wrote: “No matter the subject, the joy of painting for Harper is all about seeing shapes and colors on an abstract level and then interpreting them in her brush strokes.”
Born in Texas and raised in Missouri, Harper received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Utah’s Brigham Young University in 2002. After several years of selling her work through boutiques and frame shops—and even on eBay—she made the decision in 2007 to focus on her art full-time. A tulip festival in 2009 inspired a wide body of floral work, which landed her first show at a gallery in Provo, Utah. When she began painting her first yellow lab, Buttercup, the resulting work caught the eye of other galleries, including Astoria Fine Art in Jackson, Wyoming, where she was honored with her first solo show in 2018. In 2016, she was selected as the featured artist for the Art & Soup Charity Event in Salt Lake City, a show that annually attracts dozens of artists and thousands of patrons. Her work has been featured in American Art Collector, Southwest Art, and the Salt Lake Tribune. She paints from her studio in American Fork, Utah, where she lives with her husband, a few rascally chickens, and her yellow lab, Cricket. Cricket is the muse for many paintings!
