The Puzzle is Complete

Hannah Harper once watched a black bear bound out of the forest while she was parked at a trailhead in Glacier National Park. It playfully romped through a beautiful buffet and stuffed itself with a critical, early spring food source by eating grass and wildflowers and then ambling back into the forest.

That experience formed the backbone of a painting Harper created years ago, and she’s now in the planning phases of another painting that will use the same reference photos in a unique way. “I often want to revisit ideas or experiences and repaint them in a different way,” she says.

It’s all part of the wild puzzle that forms Harper’s approach to art. Snippets of different experiences combine on canvas to create the vision she has in her head. Currently sitting on the easel in her studio is a painting that perfectly illustrates the concept. It depicts the Grinnell Glacier area of Glacier National Park with a rugged snow-capped peak above a backcountry lake. A gnarled tree twisted by savage mountain winds stretches out on a lone branch loaded with ravens in the foreground. This isn’t how Harper saw the tree; it’s how she saw it with her artist’s eye.

“I thought it’d be kind of fun to put a bunch of ravens and little birds all along that branch like a game of telephone or something,” she says. She took that photo years ago, but it wasn’t until a recent trip to Yellowstone that Harper got the right reference material of ravens to tackle that painting. “Sometimes it takes several years to paint something that I’ve had kicking around in my head for a long time,” she says. “A lot of times I have this kind of vague idea and I just have to wait until it’s time to paint it.”

Read the full article in the September/October 2026 issue.