It’s important to me that my paintings feel alive. My collectors love my mark-making and use of color.
I am inspired by Gustav Klimt, Vincent Van Gogh, John Singer Sargent and Joaquin Sorolla.
One critic described my 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, Cristall Harper received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Utah’s Brigham Young University in 2002. She hustled for the next 16 years, experiencing rejections, failures, growth, small successes, and eventually became a professional artist. In 2018 she had her first significant gallery solo show and it’s just getting better. She paints contemporary portraits of animals and florals. Cristall Harper is becoming one of the most recognizable painters in the American West.
Her work has been featured in American Art Collector, Southwest Art, and the Salt Lake Tribune. Harper’s art is represented by galleries nationwide and collected internationally.
Cristall Harper’s oil paintings are exciting because they have a realistic abstraction. Up close, the marks are alive. But from far away, the work is very representational. She is an expert at seeing shapes and color, and everyone that collects her art remarks on both her mark-making and color-using genius.
Cristall paints from her studio in American Fork, Utah, where she lives with her husband, a few bird-brained chickens, and her yellow labs and muses, Cricket & Penelope.
Copyright ©2011– 2026 Cristall Harper Art