Painter who studied at the Royal College of Art where he won the Burston’s Award for Painting and the David Murray Travel Scholarship. In 1997 he won a South Bank Group commission. Harper exhibited at The Custard Factory in Birmingham, Jason & Rhodes, Notcut and Beaux Arts, where he had a first solo exhibition in 1998. This comprised large and detailed surfaces of thousands of blades of lush grass. Harper’s concerns were twofold: first, to use paint to represent real things; secondly, to achieve this through what was fundamentally a perfectly practised, semi-automatic process. His exhibition Green Lung, at University of Essex, Colchester, in 2001, continued his exploration of “the complex interaction between the natural and human environment.