Welcome to the tenth episode of Sustaining Craft the Podcast, a series that features those in a creative field. Listen below to learn more or keep scrolling to read about Diane Harper and her visual art!

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Sometimes Diane Harper sees critters or monsters in her ink blots.

Sometimes there’s whimsy.

Sometimes there’s an element of fantasy.

Harper is a visual artist, using water and ink on paper. “It’s basically using [ink] media on paper and then finding intriguing shapes and imagery inside the ink blots using line work, like marker, pen, that kind of thing,” Harper explained.

Her process causes some unpredictability. “I do a whole bunch of ink blots first, and then I let them dry, and then I look at the stack and decide which one I’m gonna work on and I turn it upside down and sideways and just see if something strikes me,” Harper shared. “Sometimes when I don’t know what I’m looking at, I go ahead and start making marks and then something emerges. It’s really, really spontaneous.”

She’s found that her method reveals a bit of a contradiction. “One of the things I really love about what I’m doing right now with the ink work is that it’s this kind of perfect blend of control and no control,” Harper said. “Because I have control in choosing my palette and all of that, but I don’t have control over what the ink is going to do with the water. I kind of have an idea because I’ve done it so much, but I don’t know what’s gonna come out of those. And I don’t know what I’m going to see. So I have this kind of spontaneity and immediacy that happens. And I can be real expressive with that. And then I can kind of hone it in and develop it. And that’s what I really love about the ink work that I do. It lends itself to letting go and pulling in. … It’s just like me, it’s a contradiction sometimes. And I like to encourage other people to allow the contradiction and to work with it. Because they can be really tight when they try to work, and I try to get them to loosen up. And just don’t care about it for a while.”

Ask her where it all began, and she’ll mention Germany.

Harper’s parents met while her father, Hal, was stationed overseas–her mother was French. They became a military family, with Harper the middle child of three. “I was a sick kid a lot and I grew up overseas in the military,” said Harper. “Just past toddler age in Berlin, when the Berlin wall was up, and things were pretty heated for the Cold War at the time. And I think my boogeyman was born in Berlin. Everything had barbed wire. There were armed guards everywhere, and so it was just kind of a terrifying place through a five-year-old’s eyes, but you don’t really have the vocabulary to deal with that. And then to be a sick kid in a military hospital with mostly adults around you, not a children’s hospital. It was kind of an unfriendly place. And there were noises at night and things like that, and my father was a police officer. so I knew there was danger and boogeyman out there but I didn’t have a vocabulary for it, so even as an adult I have a hard time coming up with that vocabulary, but I don’t have a hard time coming up with a visual vocabulary to describe it. And by allowing them to come to surface from my subconscious, it kind of allows me to embrace them in a different way as an adult and kind of be playful with them and be grateful that I had such a vivid imagination from the way we lived and grew up. I lived in the heart of fairy tales. We traveled in Bavaria and the Black Forest was around there, and the birthplace of Hansel and Gretel. And all of these kinds of bizarre folktales that we grew up with that were basically cautionary tales to children to mind their moms, but it was kind of a wonderful place.”

They moved back to the states when Harper was a teenager. “We didn’t get out of the military until I was a senior in high school,” Harper said. “So, it was my life. And reintegrating into the civilian world was not so easy for any one of us. But a lot of what I do now–I have a side project that I do that I call my life’s work that I call my Brat Project. And it’s all about the photos my dad took of us growing up overseas. And he was a forensic photographer with the military crime lab and then the state of Arkansas crime lab. So I have a lot of his notes from the FBI Academy and I have bizarre pictures that might go along with that kind of world, and then how he saw us through his lens as a father photographer. And so I’ve kind of been exposed to that my whole life, to composition and contrast, a lot of art things that I just had an innate ability for. So my late in life goal is to do a posthumous collaboration with my father’s work and feature his photography and my work, using his imagery and manipulating it to where I want it to, so that we can work on projects together and I can feel close to him and just kind of a life-long project using that imagery that he had for years and years.”

Hal was a self-taught photographer, using the dark rooms on base, and then continuing his work at home. “He would have all of us kids sit on the couch and hold flashcards that had shutter speed, film speed, and whatever kind of film he was using, he’d set up lights,” Harper said. “And we were his test subjects, and he would study photography through his portraits of us. I just remember him always being there with his camera. And he saw us in a way — the portraits that he took of us, they don’t look like Olan Mills portraits. They look like a dad would have taken them that had some skill, but he found our personalities in those pictures. There’s a whole series of black and white ones that he did that are particularly important to me. And I’ve done some linoleum cuts from those and printed those. And they look almost Andy Warholish, in the background that he used. That’s what kinda got me going – was those photographs. They’ve been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.”

Before Hal passed away from cancer in 2006, he told Harper he had a special project for her. “Right before he died, he told me he was leaving the biggest job in the family, and that was to archive all of his photographs,” Harder said. “And we were alone in the room in the hospital, right when he was getting on hospice and told me that’s what I needed to do. I was like, what? Because I’m talking ten thousands of negatives and thousands of photographs and I don’t know how many slides. Just unbelievable amounts.”

Harper didn’t start on the project until her mother passed away in 2010, also from cancer. “We took care of them both on hospice,” Harper said. “I think part of me doing this work now is a lot about dealing with grief and loss over the two most important people in my life. It’s a love project.”

There’s another element to Hal’s story that continues to connect Harper to her father’s work–he earned his degree a bit late in life. For 17 years, he attended classes here and there until the family moved to Arkansas. He graduated from college at the age of 50.

Before Harper went back to school herself, she had decided on a career in social work, wanting to assist those with mental health or developmental concerns. “I was interested in psychology and all of that,” she explained. “And social work borrowed from so many fields. It was the most interesting. It had that social justice component. I just enjoyed that.”

She was still able to use her creativity. “I was always creative and I think social workers have to be creative problem solvers,” Harper explained. “But I didn’t do a whole lot of art itself. I mean, I did crafts and I was always doing stuff for the house, decorating or doing things like that. But I think I got a lot of creative juices going by just being creative with my thinking. So I was kind of a little bit different in thinking outside the box. And I could brainstorm better than some. I was always able to come up with some creative ideas in hooking people up with resources, and I always thought that was because of the military, taught you flexibility and adaptability, but it was also that creative bug I had in me that did that. So I did well in social work because I would look outside the box or come up with creative analogies or metaphors or stories. So I’d always been interested in narrative things, like tales. So fairy tales was not an unusual jump for me later in life with art. I think that’s why.”

Harper decided to go back to school in 2002. Although her father had focused on a degree that benefited his work, he had added a minor in art. “We had some of the same teachers when I went back,” said Harper.

She started part-time while continuing to work. “It took me 11 years, and I was almost 51,” Harper said. “My goal was to get that degree at the same age he got his degree, ‘cause I thought, ‘I might as well do it.’ I’m going to be 50 someday or 60 someday without the degree. I might as well be 50 with it. So that’s what kind of motivated me to go back was, ‘I’m not too old; look at my dad.’ He inspired a lot of people to go back to school.”

She continues to work part-time as a social worker and varies her income streams through galleries, workshops, and educational programs. She also partners with her friend, Robert Bean, to make the opportunities to show their art if needed. “We’ll do a pop-up show or we will approach a gallery and say, ‘We have this idea,’” shared Harper. “‘We’d like to have a show, would you be interested?’ And we’ve gotten several shows that way, just by asking. … A lot of people are afraid of no. But if you never ask, you never get a yes either.”

Her goals include wanting her studio to be a spot where people can come and learn, teaching, connecting with friends while supporting their art, honing her skills, helping at the hospital, and being a good partner to her husband. She also wants to wake up with a sense of purpose every single day. “That’s my big thing,” Harper said. “Some days I say, ‘I’m not doing anything today.’ And that’s my purpose. One of the things I realized about being a social worker that I realized was different than a lot of other careers is that I have never in my adult life had a day where I didn’t know if I had a sense of purpose in life. That’s really freeing, existentially, because I don’t have to worry about that. So now I feel like, I can approach art with a hedonist fervor if I feel like it, because I’ve really, really been doing the hard work with people all these years. And it feels good. And let’s say in the future, if I’m not working in social work, I’m still working with people because I’ll still have contact creatively with them. I think I’ll just shift focus and my purpose will be to spread creativity to people. I don’t even have to spread it because they’ve already got it. It’s just to help unlock it in other people.”

And then there’s the attempt to reconcile her art with her social work. “I really had some conflicts, not knowing how to combine social work with art and not knowing how I could be two different people, and I think this is the year that I figured it out that I’m not two different people,” Harper said. “That they work together and I don’t have to separate them.”

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Friend Diane on Facebook and send her a message to connect or throw her art page a like. You can also follow her adventures on Instagram, or visit her website.

And there are a few ways to find Diane’s art in person: she’ll be at Art on the Creeks in Rogers, Arkansas on Sept. 29; she’ll have some work in the Fiber Arts Show on Nov. 2, and at the Gallery 26 Holiday Show. She also has a booth at South Main Creative.

And, as always, there’s a whole lot more in the podcast episode! We talked about what inspires her, how her social work allowed her to be creative, some of the horrors she encountered as a child that she didn’t quite understand, and what’s coming up next.