Cristall Harper is a prolific painter and dog-lover. She graduated from BYU with a BFA in Painting. Harper lives in Utah. She explains about her muse, “I have a yellow lab named Buttercup who epitomizes loyalty, joy and friendship. I started painting her as a pup and my passion for capturing her happiness quickly grew. Now my dog paintings are in numerous galleries and dog-lovers everywhere are connecting with my work.”

Tell us about your evolution as an artist. I quit my day job and started doing art full time in 2008, about five years after I graduated from BYU. I’d do little daily paintings, list them on my blog and eBay, and I’d have shows at my apartment (later my house) inviting friends and family. I would show my work in any venue I could get with anybody willing to give me space. It didn’t always mean sales, but it did help me feel like I was moving in the right direction to promote myself. Fast-forward 8 years and fantastic galleries in Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho now represent me and I’m in a place where I can pick and choose where and how to invest my artistic energy. I am extremely diligent in the studio and on the business end of being an artist. It blows my mind to think back to my college apartment where I had a small corner of a shared bedroom to paint, to the days of making slides and mailing them to galleries (thank you internet and websites!), to the Christmas my sweet dad bought me paints because I couldn’t afford all the colors I wanted. Now I’ve got a 330 square foot studio in my backyard (with plans in the works for an even bigger one) built from money I saved by teaching art lessons for four years at the same time I was trying to build a name for myself, and I recently used money from my art business to fly home to help care for my dad when he had knee replacement surgery. I love the growth cycle: artists receive help and advice and artists give help and advice. I’m grateful to associate with other professionals who give me that help and advice today. I’ve evolved from a timid artist that didn’t have much of a “brand” or style into a strong artist that knows her own mind, has a vision, and works consistently at goals. My business mantra is to keep looking forward to new ideas, new methods, new opportunities, new paintings. All artists have that stack of homeless what-was-I-thinking paintings collecting dust in some forgotten nook. I used to fret over this other side of the coin, but being a painter who tries new things means you’ll make good work and bad work. My favorite movie line in Disney’s The Incredibles is Edna Mode’s line “I never look back, darling, it distracts from the now.”

You once wrote, “Dogs are furry angels of joy.” Tell us about your dog and your related paintings. Buttercup is our 10-year-old yellow lab. I love animals, but I really, really love dogs. Buttercup is my best friend. Her face is in the window when I pull into the drive, her tail wags when I tell her about random things, and she is my companion all day long while I work. I did some paintings of her for fun in my early days as an artist. I had no idea that these little dog paintings would get me into a Park City gallery seven years later. My dog paintings make up about half of my annual painting production, meaning I’ll do about 70 a year for galleries, shows and commissions. I’ve recently started a water dog series (labs swimming with or without sticks and tennis balls) that I’m really excited about.

Visit Cristall Harper’s website.

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Ron Russon‘s original painting style is called a ‘modern expression of nature in art’. He attended both UVCC and the illustration program at BYU. As his bio explains, “While going to BYU, Ron was involved in a severe car accident, leaving him with a smashed car and broken neck. It slowed his progress for a bit, but he recovered and went back to school, and even accomplished an internship in New York City at Illustration House, studying under several prominent illustrators and artists. Ron became a freelance illustrator and gained several clients, but he is drawn back to his rural roots of farms and wildlife. Listening to bluegrass or space-pop, Ron paints in oil employing a loose brush and pallet knife to varied scenes, from a serene resting tractor in a windrowed field of hay to a cacophony of geometric colors creating luminescent bison. Through both abstraction and realism, his art reflects his relationship with nature and his communication with the outdoors.” He lives in Utah.

Tell us about your evolution as an artist. My evolution as an artist is ongoing I hope. I originally wanted to be rather realistic in my approach. It was satisfying to see that I could make paintings and drawings look like a photo. It was tedious and detailed stuff that ultimately felt like a parlor trick to me. I was exposed to more modern approaches to painting in my journey of education at UVU and BYU. I had often not considered modern, abstract, or non-objective styles to have much value. I remember hearing from an instructor of mine, at BYU, how we need to give other forms of art a chance before rejecting it outright. He gave the example of seeing one of Jackson Pollack’s paintings in real life and trying to perceive what he was conveying. I had that opportunity on an internship in New York. I was able to spend some time with a few Jackson Pollack paintings there. It was transformative. I saw Vincent VanGough paintings, Kandinski, de Kooning, Rothko, Norman Rockwell, all kinds of work done in all kinds of fashion. That in a way gave me permission to pursue something beyond traditional realism and I could step out beyond the crutch of pure representational work. I was free from making a painting look like a photo. I now really try to pursue a more expressive style hopefully provocative or evocative but not offensive. I want people to be moved by my work by the texture or the color or perhaps deeper meaning through symbolism and metaphor. I’m working to make my art require someone to spend time with it, to allow themselves to think and become part of the artwork. The work hopefully goes beyond mere decoration and has impact for a lasting positive change.

You once said, ‘Sometimes an artist needs a kick in the butt.’ A great local Utah writer named Ehren Clark interviewed me and he is the one who coined that phrase of “needing a kick in the butt”. I was pursuing a career in illustration after graduating from BYU. I graduated in Illustration Design and I immediately got work upon graduation. It was a fruitful time for illustrators. That was not to last however. Many of my jobs lost budget as more jobs used photos and scanned work instead of commissioned work. Stock illustration became the next wave. It was a time for me to try to become an artist instead of an illustrator. I didn’t have much to lose and I had always wanted to be a fine art painter. So the impetus, or “Kick in the Butt” was the lack of illustration jobs that I used to have. It was a motivation to allow me a leap of faith towards my take on art. I took the chance to try what I wanted to do and be self driven and pursue my own work and style. I had always felt that I was given an art interest and even perhaps a mod comb of talent for a purpose or reason. My intent in my work is to provide expression, conversation, interest, reflection, introspection, and thought. If I can do that then my purpose or reason comes to fruition.

You work is very organic and colorful. How do you keep your art fresh? I am glad you find my work organic and colorful. I hope that is just an extension of me. I think that if there is any freshness it is due to my spiritual center. I find that I need to keep myself steeped in spirituality to have good work come out. I feel that my work is an extension of my soul and spirit. I find that if I am doing the right stuff like reading scripture, pondering, praying, participating in church, listening to the prophet and apostles my work is much more interesting and fresh. Being a good Mormon boy seems to help keep the flow of inspiration in my work. I don’t plan out my paintings much. I generally let them happen like a dance or an improvisational jazz piece. I find that is where I am in constant need and desire of inspiration and that place is a place where my artwork comes from. I am glad you find it fresh. I think that lets me know I’m heading in the right direction.

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William Whitaker is an acclaimed portrait artist and noted art professor and teacher. He is the most often mentioned artist on The Krakens for his influence on the Mormon art community. He as born in Chicago, Illinois to an artist father and has developed a long career with a legion of remarkable paintings. He taught art at BYU for years and currently lives in Utah.

You have painted many of the Church leaders over the years. How would you say the Church’s relationship to art has evolved in that time? The most impressive thing are the great numbers of incredibly young art talents coming along. Our art will increasingly become more sophisticated and of higher quality as the years pass. As a people, we probably have the greatest number of superior talents in all fields and receive the least recognition for it of any group I know.

Jerry Seinfeld once wrote, ‘The female body is a work of art. The male body is utilitarian, it’s for getting around–like a jeep.’ Tell us about your lifelong pursuit of painting the female portraits. Seinfeld said it a lot better than I ever could! His observation about women is correct. It’s almost as if God was practicing when he created man, But got it right when he created woman. I believe that the eternal woman is the most beautiful creation in the entire universe.

Visit William Whitaker’s website.

Whitney Johnson paints compelling geometric constructions with curious shapes, colors, and compositions. She is from Cleveland, Ohio and graduated from BYU with a BFA degree in Studio Arts: Painting and Drawing. She also studied oil painting in Florence, Italy at the Santa Reparata International School of Art.

Talk to us about the messages symbolism you portray with your art. The underlying themes and concepts in my artwork are deeply personal to me, and are usually inspired by a simple word or phrase that resonates within me—for one reason or another. I usually have a “plan” for what I want my painting to end up like, but of course it never turns out the way I expect it to and the whole process from start to finish is basically an epic string of failed experiments. Lots of trial and error and problem solving. Which can be terribly frustrating at times. I use symbolism as a way to explore the word or phrase that originally caught my attention—to go deeper into what it means to me and understand more fully why it sparked something within me in the first place. Symbolism also allows me to portray all the different layers of a single concept, which allows a kind of learning process to take place as I create.

Talk about juggling motherhood with your art career? Between living in small apartments with not a lot of space to set up a studio and becoming a mother (to a toddler and newborn twins!), I’ve definitely had to redefine what it means to make “art” in the traditional sense. I asked one of my professors in college one time if it was possible to be a mom and a part-time artist, and his response was something along the lines of there being no such thing as a “part-time artist”—you’re either an artist or you’re not. Truth be told, I haven’t been producing a whole lot of paintings in the recent years, but I’ve continued to develop my creative muscle and aesthetic style in different ways in my daily life, for which I am very grateful. I’ve allowed myself to not feel limited in my career as an artist just because I don’t have the time or space to paint, but to find beauty and purpose and meaning through photography, homemaking, and motherhood in general. With that being said, I have plans to make painting a part of my regular routine again, which I am really excited about. My three beautiful children inspire and teach me on a daily basis, and have only motivated me more in developing my creativity.

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Tom Plummer employed a circuitous route to his current station as a professional artist. Not many of the artists profiled on The Krakens boast a Harvard Ph.D. or published works with titles like German Realism of the Twenties or Film and Politics in the Weimar Republic. Plummer lives in Utah.

Tell us about your evolution as an artist. My career as an artist began about four years ago. I had previously had a career in academia, obtaining a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Harvard. From graduate school I took a faculty position in German at the University of Minnesota and was almost immediately drawn into early German cinema. When I saw the film, Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari, I was stunned. Nothing I had ever read or seen twisted my mind like that film, the story of a mad psychiatrist and his somnambulist patient. The painted sets of the film in black and white, with oblique angles, ill-fitting costumes, angled lighting, and stylized gestures just blew my mind. Both my teaching and research crisscrossed with expressionism a number of times. When I began painting after retirement, I returned to my roots in early 20th century German art, where I had first encountered the collages of Hannah Höch and John Heartfield and the colorful paintings of the Bridge and the Blue Rider. My paining style, consequently, inclines to strong colors and abstraction.

Describe your latest work. More recently I have tried to expand my painting style, taking German New Objectivity of the Weimar era as a model. While it is more realistic than German expressionism, it shares a passion for color and distortion. I have begun expanding my painting from watercolor into acrylics, which I like for the brilliant colors that are possible and experimented with applying paint to glassine and fabrics to change the quality of the paint itself.

You have written, “I have struggled to paint with emotion.” Explain. My entire training, from my earliest years, was toward academics in the sense of research and critical writing. I lived in a rational, logical world. Yes, I worked with German Expressionism and New Objectivity in my early career, but as an academic, not as an artist. My parents were educators, but creating art was not part of their world. I learned to appreciate art, but as an observer and as an academic, not as an artist. When I began painting I had breakthroughs into expressionist style right away, but I always tried to retreat to a coloring-book style. Approaching art in an irrational way frightened me. Readers who have spent their life as artists may not understand what I’m saying. Letting go of control, just sloshing paint onto a canvas or paper scared me. Marian Dunn, my teacher, recognized that I was struggling, and one night in class, as I was trying to paint “inside the lines,” she said, “That’s not what you do.” She snatched the brush from my hand, smooshed it into a gob of green paint, and sloshed a wide swath across my paper. “That’s what you do,” she said. My real breakthrough into the irrational side came when I was hypnotized in a comedy show in Las Vegas. I did not plan to be hypnotized, I just wanted to watch a crazy show with 2000 other people. Without disclosing details, that’s where I learned to trash boundaries, rules, inhibitions, and anxieties. I learned to take mental journeys to dead artists, to talk to them about my struggles, what to do when I was stuck. They always gave me hell and sent me back to my canvas with new ideas.

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