How to use this Page

I really think you will enjoy your visit this week with Lee Harper.  I remember a few years back, when he attended an SCBWI event and drew immediate attention.  You will see why as you scroll down to his artwork.  Here is Lee in his own words:

When I was a kid, art was important to me — it was a special world I could visit when I needed to escape the tumultuous reality of my dysfunctional family life. I loved inventing alternative worlds, and I loved entering the worlds other artists created in books. I got to be quite a connoisseur. By second grade I could tell the real artists from the artists just out to make a buck. I could tell that artists just doing a job from nine to five drew my Hot Wheels coloring book, and that a real artist drew Fox in Sox.

My abilities in art led me to a place called the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where I majored in drawing, painting, and sculpting in clay. It was at the Academy where I learned Dr. Seuss was just an illustrator. I learned illustrators (the word ‘illustrators’ was usually spoken in the same tone Seinfeld uses when he says ‘Newman’) were kind of like fine artists who’d sold their soul. Fine artists draw figures, still-lives, landscapes, or sometimes abstractions. So that’s what I did. I still did caricatures of my friends for fun, but I didn’t dare risk the ridicule I’d have received had I shown those drawings to my instructors. I was a fine artist now. Fine artist don’t draw cartoons.

After I graduated I got married and started a family. I found it impossible to survive as a fine artist. So to earn a living I started a picture framing business. The idea was to grow the business to the point where I could have assistants do most of the framing, and then I would get back to my real life’s work of being a fine artist. The plan was going well.  The business grew for many years, I had great employees that were starting to handle the workload, and by 1999 I’d grown out of my workspace and set up a new shop/art studio in New Hope, PA. It turned out to be a disastrous move. It never took root. Who’d have thought people would need a place to park their cars? Instead of relocating, I decided to use the business failure as an opportunity to try something new. After all, it wasn’t like I loved framing pictures.  It was just the means to the end.

First I tried landscape architecture. After a few college courses involving the memorization of plant names I realized landscape architecture wasn’t going to work.  I was terrible at memorizing plant names. Then I switched my focus to ventriloquist dummy making, but that didn’t last long, either. My wife said she would divorce me if I became a ventriloquist dummy maker. I changed focus again…this time to real estate sales. I went on a few sales calls and quickly realized I’m not a real estate salesperson. I needed to make things. But whatever I did, I was determined that I would stay true to the ideals of fine art. I would keep that part of me pure. I wouldn’t sell my soul.

Around this time I was making abstract art. I found a gallery to represent me, and began selling my abstractions. But the way I felt about art was changing. It was no longer something I did as an escape from reality like it was when I was a kid. So why was I doing it? I asked myself. I found myself questioning the basic principals of fine art that I’d learned at the Academy. Why was I working so hard to create something that would probably just end up decorating the mansion of Tyler Greystone, the CEO of Greystone Enterprises, and then after h