Pictured in Time:

About the Author

Neil Harpe was born in Annapolis, Maryland, where he grew up along the creeks and backwater marshes of the Chesapeake Bay, the region where his family has lived for generations. Swimming, crabbing, fishing, and watching watermen at their daily activities were a part of his childhood and fostered an early love of nature and the sea.

The Annapolis of Neil’s youth was a working port town, the harbor often filled with fishing boats.  Watermen came daily to unload their catches at the City Dock.  It was a way of life that he took for granted would always exist.  After growing up and moving farther from the water, Neil visited Annapolis periodically only to find the rapid changes that had taken place throughout the Bay area.  Sleek yachts began to take over the creeks where workboats once proliferated and tourists, not watermen, filled the docks.  Influenced by his memories of a way of life now vanishing, Neil has been drawn to portray the poetic beauty of the maritime world: graceful skipjacks; aging fishing boats; the Bay’s unique lighthouses; fishing ports like Tilghman, Deal Island, Crisfield and Annapolis; and the flat, grassy marshlands along the shore.

During the 1980s, Neil made numerous trips out on the Chesapeake aboard skipjacks and workboats, observing firsthand the labors of watermen and recording the experience with many photographs.  These photographs have served as models for ensuing paintings, drawings, and prints.  Neil approaches his art through a variety of mediums including watercolor, acrylics, graphite, lithography, and etching.  He often combines several different approaches in a single work.  For example, his meticulously drawn lithographs colored with delicate watercolor washes are a 19th century technique seldom seen today -- yet he manages to convey a modern freshness which befits his vision of the maritime world as a combination of the past and the present.

After completing the four-year studio art program majoring in graphics (printmaking) at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC and earning his BFA in multi-media at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Neil went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree in stone and plate lithography at George Washington University.  Neil’s Chesapeake Bay lithographs were included in the Art in Embassies Program of the U.S. State Department and were displayed at U.S. Embassies throughout the globe. His mixed-media watercolor Off Season - Deal Island received an Award of Excellence at the 13th Annual Mystic International Exhibition. He is an artist member of the American Society of Marine Artists; his work is in numerous galleries and corporate and private collections, including the Beverley R. Robinson Collection of the U.S. Naval Academy Museum, the Calvert Marine Museum, and Westinghouse.