Hannah Harper | Animal Stories

By Elizabeth L. Delaney

Hannah Harper has spent her life surrounded by art and animals. As if that were by design, she developed a passion for both from the very beginning. Drawing, painting, designing—all feed her creative desires. Rabbits, foxes, deer, bears, birds—all fascinate and delight her as they transform into characters for her art stories.

Harper grew up in Oklahoma with animals that filled her with an eagerness to know them. On her grandparents’ horse ranch, she spent a lot of time outside with the horses, chickens and other farm animals that captured her attention and made her feel connected to the natural world. “I always had a close relationship with all the animals I was surrounded by,” Harper says. “I’ve always admired them; I think they’re beautiful.”

Her love of animals coalesced with her creative drive at a very early age. Her mother, a barrel racer and artist who liked to paint and draw horses, recognized the same affinity for art making in her daughter. “I was always encouraged,” recalls Harper. “She was putting paintbrushes and crayons in my hands as soon as I could hold a pencil.”

But her art exposure didn’t end there. Harper regularly attended the annual Prix de West exhibition at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, and the experience of walking among so many Western masters and their work made a lasting impression on her.

After her senior year of high school, following the Prix de West show, Harper signed up for a workshop at the Oklahoma-based museum with renowned painters Terri Kelly Moyers and John Moyers. It would turn out to be one of the most important steps on her path toward becoming a professional artist. She developed a strong pedagogical rapport and friendship with the couple, and she eventually traveled to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to study with them at their studio. While in Santa Fe, she also studied at the Ryder Atelier with Anthony Ryder and Celeste Simon Ryder. These formative experiences helped her develop a strong technical foundation as well as a deep appreciation of plein air painting and observing subject matter from life.

Harper remained in New Mexico for the next few years, where she attended the University of New Mexico, earning her BFA in 2019. By 2023, she had completed her MFA from the University of Oklahoma, where she mounted a thesis show consisting of 16 illustrated triptychs. After briefly teaching as an adjunct professor, she decided to take the next step in her journey and begin painting full-time.

Selected as part of Southwest Art’s “21 Under 31” annual editorial feature devoted to young artists to watch in 2021, Harper has continued to hone her craft as she brings animals to life in paintings that combine the traditional expertise of a wildlife artist with the modern, graphic mores of an illustrator.

Harper’s work maintains a purity of form, presenting animals as protagonists in their own narratives, unencumbered by and independent of the human world. Her style encompasses her fascination with naturalistic representations of animals along with her interest in the art of illustration and evocative graphic elements. In combining these influences, she has forged her signature aesthetic: the fusion of representational animal forms with a contemporary treatment of space, line and shape.

Intent on studying wild animals in their own environments, Harper makes several trips out west every year to gather reference material and share space with her subjects. Some of her favorite sites include Banff, Alberta; Glacier National Park; and Yellowstone, where two of her favorite grizzly bears reside. Consequently, it was during a 2016 trip to Yellowstone that she saw bears in the wild for the first time, inspiring her to work with larger species in her paintings. “It really changed my focus,” she says of the encounter. “I just loved them so much and thought they were so much fun to watch.”

Indeed, as much as the animals have warmed her heart, they have also taught her a few things about the world at large. “Innocence and purity are inherent to animals. Nature is brutal, but they are built to endure,” she says. “Humans possess that same resilience—the ability to survive, weather storms and keep going. I think we can all be inspired by animals’ ability to continuously adapt to their surroundings.”

That inspiration and resolve factor into Harper’s artistic practice. Traveling into wild spaces, patiently waiting and watching for the animals, taking hundreds of photos and making plein air sketches for reference material all allow her to share her experiences and passion for her subject matter with viewers. Her creative process is fluid. Sometimes she builds paintings around photos and sketches selected from her trove, and sometimes she has an idea for a painting that she puts on hold until she finds the right animal in the right situation to realize the composition.

What remains constant, however, is her process of painting from life, of observing animals in their natural habitats and translating their characteristics, actions and idiosyncrasies into two dimensions. “I love all the personalities you see, and I just want to capture that in what I’m painting,” she says. To that end, she composes intimate, personal vignettes that elevate and revere her subjects as complex beings.

SOLSTICE SOIREE evokes the quiet serenity of a warm, moonlit night. The composition is full of contrasts, mingling a sturdy, stoic fox with delicate moths while compressing luminous foreground flowers into a solid background. The resulting flattened space and scale add a contemporary, illustrative quality to the landscape. The scene has a narrative quality as well, reading like a page from a storybook and nudging the viewer to wonder what’s happening on the periphery. “It’s always my goal to bring that traditional foundation into what I’m doing and give it a little more of a contemporary or storytelling edge,” says Harper.

One of Harper’s recent paintings, THE REFEREES, depicts a sparring match between two bull elks as magpies flutter around them. Based on a scene Harper witnessed in Banff, the piece highlights the power of nature’s most basic form of communication. Here, the curving lines of the intertwined antlers create a graceful, symmetrical vertical flow softly framed by the birds. Characteristic of Harper’s style, the background remains indistinct, allowing the action to remain in the foreground and keeping the emphasis on the animals and their movements.

“I love old illustrations, and a lot of those artists would put their subjects against a flat background,” Harper explains. “It gives me the opportunity to focus on the composition I’m creating. I like being able to make the subject a little bit more complicated and intricate and not have it on top of something that’s also complicated.”

That principle emerges in another recent painting inspired by an eagle sighting Harper had while on a picnic in Montana. Set high up in the trees, THE KING AND THE JESTERS pairs the potential energy of the eagle about to take off with the kinetic energy of the tree swallows flitting about—all against a flat, muted backdrop. The juxtaposition of detailed feathers and tree bark with the subtle blues of sky behind them concentrates the action.

Harper paints to honor and celebrate the animals she adores, and she strives to impart her fascination and affection for them to viewers. “I hope my paintings bring people joy and maybe spark some curiosity,” she says. “I always hope that wherever they end up, they bring the collectors a little bit of happiness over time.”

Thinking about what she has learned over the years observing and painting animals, Harper says, “Every species is designed intentionally and perfectly for specific purposes, from varying beak shapes to different types of fur and undercoats. This individuality is so beautiful, and I am in awe of just how vast the variety of Earth’s creatures is. I have always been drawn to their purity, personalities, quirks and relationships with one another. I have found that, in many ways, we are not so different.”

Elizabeth L. Delaney is a freelance arts writer and editor.

contact informationhannahharperart.com

representationManitou Galleries, Santa Fe, NM, manitougalleries.com.Claggett/Rey Gallery, Edwards, CO, claggettrey.com.

upcoming showsWestern Visions Art Show + Sale, National Museum of Wildlife Art, September 5-26.Small Works, Great Wonders, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, November 2026.

This story appeared in the June/July 2026 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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