In his studio, a rented, ancient basement as grungy as his beard, I easily noticed a bird guide book poking out of his backpack. All around me were paintings resting against the walls, and doors waiting to be endowed with an image. Cans of house paint were piled on the table, and a pencil, buried in a ball of dried paint as thick as a door knob, lay out on his table. “That is from layers and layers of dried paint,” Jamie said, pointing to the pencil, its eraser the only identifiable part.
Jamie moved to Winona from outside of Chicago. He was looking for a river, and decided to “settle” for the River. After college, he started teaching for Bluff-View Montessori, and then later moved over to Riverway Learning Community, where he currently teaches. When asked why he doesn’t commit more of his time to his art, he casually responded that he loves his job too much to quit and go full time – and this seems to be a good thing. The symbiotic relationship between his passions of teaching and art not only helped him get his start, but continues to influence his painting.
He became an artist almost by accident. Looking for a cheap, educational Earth Day project to do with his students, Jamie got buckets of recycled latex paint and cardboard, and then set his students free. In my mind, having laid the instruments before his students, I can hear him sound the battle cry, “GO. MAKE ART!” Looking at their spills, drips, dribbles, splashes, and swirls, Jamie couldn’t help but join in. Suddenly, he was hooked, not realizing that his student project turned secret hobby would soon explode into full artist-hood.
Standing in his studio, dressed in a paint-splattered t-shirt, he flicks the pencil and watches how paint lands on the canvas. With no formal training and only three years practicing his craft, he confesses that he has already memorized different techniques of flicking—it’s getting to be a science. Swirls, drips, splashes, and splatters give his art a feeling of electric, almost humming energy that has been captured, as if a lightning bolt were frozen.
He goes on to reveal the important connection between his day job and his development as an artist. Pointing to a row of paintings leaning against the wall, “I learned to do these drip paintings from a sixth grader,” he laughs. “I said, do whatever you want to. So, she started making these awesome paintings and pretty soon the whole class was doing it.” And, now he is, too.
As for materials, Jamie continues to use what he started with, incorporating a few improvements. Under the moniker “Salvaged Medium”, he continues to use surplus and recycled paints but has traded in the cardboard for rescued hollow-core doors. He reasons that they are in high supply/low demand and are lighter to hang. These make perfect canvases, and endow unused doors with renewed, explosive life. On full and cut-to-size doors coated in paint, splashed and flecked are bicycles and barns, mushrooms and muskies, trains and tractors, herons and lilies. Harper’s work covers the gamut of what makes Winona a gem in the Driftless Region, all things dear to him and his community.
With the amount of work he has been producing, it’s no small wonder that Jamie has been getting some buzz in the local area, featuring art exhibits at Ed’s No Name Bar, The Acoustic Café, The Bookshelf, and The Red Horse Gallery. With local support, he’s being propelled to a larger audience. He worked with Duluth’s Blue Grass legend, Charlie Parr, to create the album art for his latest release, “Barnswallow”. Picture a red field with a black bird—a swift—soaring across, and splashed all over with little sparks of white and blue whipping by. For those that know his work, it is quintessentially “Harper”, and him at his best. This summer, he took his show on the road, selling paintings out of his car on a nation-wide road trip following the little known band Phish, having to stop in Winona to reload his inventory.
“I started to sell paintings because I needed to get rid of them so I could make more,” he confides. Whether by word of mouth or social media, Jamie tries to keep his painting out there in the public’s eye, and so far the community loves it. There are days where he will post a painting in the morning and have it sell by evening. With several more shows coming up and no signs of slowing down, I asked what is next for his art. He thought for a bit, then said, “I am starting to get into some other artists and am actually reading about art. I think that is going to influence my work.”
Jamie is one of those characters that adds to this town’s Mark-Twain-Fictional-Utopic feel: beautiful, yet quirky, smart and complex, and still big hearted and real. In tune with his surroundings and engrained in his community, this teacher, musician, and artist gives us all more than just redeemed doors and recycled paints. Like any great artist, he ennobles everything around him.
Special thanks to Brianna Haupt and Sarah Word for their contributions to this piece.