Art flows though bronze sculptor, Peter Harper’s veins. Both the son and grandson of artists, from an early age he was encouraged to follow his bliss. Harper recounts a time when he told his grandfather about alternate career plans. “Why would you want to be a lawyer?” Harper bellows, playing both sides of the conversation. “So we can have some money in the family, we’re all broke!” His grandfather’s response was one that would stick with him. “Ahh! You should do what makes you happy. There are more important things than money.”
Growing up, Harper was immersed in art and music, spending his time at the Claremont Folk Music Center (http://www.folkmusiccenter.org/) a store and center established by his maternal grandparents who first warned him about not pursuing his dreams. “It was essentially my daycare,” he recalls. “And I would literary spend every day as a kid, and when I went to school it was every day after school. All the way up until junior high school, maybe…I spent my every waking day, in the Claremont village around the Folk Music Center, and listening to music being played. There would be music playing all the time.”
The music playing all the time would change, as Harper became a teenager and his tastes expanded to include rap. Harper laughs, recalling the older generation’s response. “I remember my—one great great friend of mine—who’s still a best friend to this day, his dad is talking to us about rap music and he’s like, ahh rap music! It’ll be gone in two years and nobody will be listening to it. I said, “Have you lost your mind? Do you have any idea? This is the music of a culture of a people—this is not going anywhere! This is huge! He was like, nah, people hate it. It’ll be gone. And sure enough all these years later it’s gigantic.”
Harper’s journey to harness his creative side would eventually lead him into bronze sculpting, a rarity for someone so young. However, Harper enjoys standing out in a crowd. “I go to these bronze foundries and the people at these bronze foundries, they’re sixty-five to eighty years old. Because bronze is a dead art…they love it—someone young, making art. Making bronze art, it’s unheard of!” Unheard of, maybe—but Harper is a man of unique passion, going so far as to forming his own company Last Three Rhinos—named after an animal he fell in love with during a year’s stay in Zimbabwe. “…I started thinking about my brothers and I and how we protect one-another and how we sort of tended to each other. And thought about how we’re all artists and how we’re all doing our thing. And what a dying breed that is. And how, in some ways, in our own fields, we’re the last ones doing what we’re doing with the craft that we’re doing.”
One of Harper’s brother-rhinos is noted multi-instrumentalist Ben Harper. Harper is wildly supportive of his sibling’s success. “I’m his number two fan. I always put my mom in front of me in terms of fandom because she birthed him so she gets sort of first place rights. he laughs. “But I don’t think there’s any musician in this world today playing music right now, who can play as diverse a sound as he can. On one album you go pop, reggae, folk, rock, soul—all across the gambit, totally different instruments, totally different sounds, totally different styles of singing, styles of lyrics, styles of music—and all done right. He’s got—and I don’t want to speak for him, this is just my interpretation of what he does, but having heard a lot of music—there is nobody out there—there are people out there that are doing a cover version of what he does.”
While not a musician himself, music is never far from Harper’s work “It doesn’t generally directly—it has—but it doesn’t generally directly show itself in my work. “ he muses. “I’ve got a couple of pieces that are directly about music or about dancing or about that vibe in and of itself. But one of the great things about working with your hands is that your ears are free. In your mind, when you’re creating a sculpture, it’s not like reading or having to type some sort of thing where you have to be focused in that moment. It’s about exploring a space. So music, and the iPod, changed everything. Being able to put headphones on, put an iPod in your pocket—which is now an iPhone, it changes everything. And to listen to a sound, or a song that moves you and inspires you—there’s nothing better than to make a sculpture to that kind of music. You find an artist that you like, you find somebody who’s sound hits you in that right way, and you can loop that over and over and over again while you’re making a piece and it sort of helps you cruise though the day. It adds sort of a background inspiration. I don’t know if there’s anything more potent than music for that.”
Still, it’s his brother’s music that Harper first thinks of when describing the perfect album. “There’s no such thing as the perfect album,” he’s quick to point out. “The closest—actually as I’m sitting here describing all these things—are all things that my brother does. It has to be an album that’s diverse in sound, so it’s not just playing one single genre. It has to be multiple genres with exceptionally talented musicians, vocalists, and should be about fifteen tracks long. So that when it loops it back to the first song again, I don’t feel like I just heard it, it’s given me some distance. And fifteen tracks is the minimum. Ideally it’s like twenty-three—twenty-three is a great number for tracks on one album, because literarily when you hit twenty-three you’ve forgotten about track number one!” Musical amnesia from the perfect album? Now there’s an art!
Written by Laura Studarus
Photograph by David Studarus
Peter Harper is bronze sculptor, ardent music fan, and brother to Ben Harper. He’s thankful that his grandfather talked him out of being a lawyer. We are too.
