Harper has studied a variety of styles but chose Realism and the nude figure as his focus. Realism, because he was looking for something concrete, that could challenge his skills with definable goals. Nudes, because art is exclusively a human activity, therefore as an artist, and human, he found the human form to be the most compelling subject for realist painting. Harper states, "...I thought the ideal "object" in our experience of the real world would be ourselves, the physical form of the human being." After focusing on the human form alone, Harper began to look for a new approach to his work. He saw that a lot of the interest in them was verging on voyeurism. I felt that I needed to expand the parameters of my work in order to take it beyond merely being finely detailed paintings of nude figures. I had to go further. So I developed for myself a linear model of thinking about painting where hyper realist figurative painting was at one extreme end of the spectrum. Then I proposed to take the polar opposite, non objective painting, and juxtapose it with what I was already working on. These non-objective paintings are the black panel paintings paired with the nudes that will be seen in April's show. These panels have become an integral part of his work. He sees them as "dream images that are at the point just before recognition where they cannot yet be put into words..." They become vedics about the nature of physical reality as in his work, Claudio IV to allegories of procreation and being, as in Julie I. Harper's works involve the multilayering of several very thin translucent coats of paint. The process is long and tedious and to him, meditative. One of his figure paintings can take from two to six months to complete, and sometimes up to two years. I see my painting akin to alchemy where the external world is processed through my eyes and my internal world and then manifested again on to the canvas; where inert matter, mineral, pigments and oils, are transmuted into a meaningful illusion of presence with life of its own.