Andy Harper lives and works in Cornwall, on the southwestern edge of the United Kingdom. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Painting & Printmaking from Brighton Polytechnic, Brighton and holds two Master of Arts degrees: one in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, and one in Visual Culture from Middlesex University, London. Harper has exhibited widely in Europe, North America, and South Korea.

Unlike almost all artists working in oil paint who allow paint to dry before adding a layer, Harper works entirely with wet paint. He scrapes, amends and pushes the wet paint to create a work which has only one layer but appears to have a lot of depth. Each layer gels quickly, requiring rapid and precise mark making. He paints dense tangles of foliage and natural matter in surreal swirls of color. His paintings act as landscapes seen as if from the ground up, invoking the inevitable process of growth and decay that occurs on the forest floor. His titles are often borrowed from place names in the United Kingdom.

"[Each] painting is witness to thousands of rapid decisions. Evidenced by every twist, jerk, stroke, rhythm, division and line drawn into the wet paint. Like an archaeological trace, each work extends my understanding of procedural memory, visual thinking, pattern recognition, sensory processing, neuroaethestics and haptic perception. Before long the resinous film begins to stiffen and gel. Once dry, the painting is a record, not of the visual world, but of thought." - Andy Harper

His visual vocabulary has developed in two intertwined and almost scientific ways: one stems from a questioning of studio practices as Harper tests the capacity of certain implements; the other emerges from the close study of real organic matter. His observation of existing plants, however, is deeply tied to his studio practice and the two strands of his artistic method evolve together and, one could say, simultaneously literally and figuratively. For Harper, these concerns also connect to a wider context of the history of botany and the transportation of plants around the globe.

In 1996, Harper co-founded NotCut with peers from the Royal College of Art, which ran a studio and photographic darkroom in London until 2010 and curated 'Lightness & Weight' at the Custard Factory in Birmingham. He has taught both nationally in the UK and internationally, holding posts at prestigious institutions including Central St. Martins. Currently, Harper is a Senior Lecturer on the MFA Fine Art program at Goldsmiths, University of London.