Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Laura “Rarabird” Harper. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Laura “Rarabird”, appreciate you joining us today. I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?
I thought about this during 90% of my creative jobs! Most of the scenic jobs I did when I was making and maintaining theme park attractions involved working in un-airconditioned metal warehouses in the Florida heat, which meant wearing short-shorts and tank tops and working with resins and toxic foams. These industrial substances would burn your skin if they touched you while curing. so we had to wear these horrible, non-breathable paper protective bodysuits, and three pairs of latex gloves and a rubber gas mask, or we would “suffer greatly” (we were suffereing anyway). I was too poor to afford an air-conditioned car OR apartment, so I basically was subjected to constant sweating, heat rashes and heat exhaustion for years. And then theme-park attraction maintenance mean being up on the night shift for years, installing props, painting in the dark (with lamps), having a disrupted normal sleep schedule, and only ever seeing your coworkers, because the rest of the land of the living was on an opposite schedule: NO social life and walking around like a zombie on your day off. And many of these attractions needed repair on the OUTSIDE, which meant either working in sweltering humidity with a bajillion insects swarming around your industrial lamps (and going down your shirt openings, getting stuck in your paint, or to your sweaty body), or below-freezing conditions (once I worked in Wisconsin where it stayed about 13* for most of Jan/Feb), working in a manlift in the rain, or at great heights on scaffolding. It wasn’t worth climbing down and unsuiting just to take breaks, so you stayed up there and suffered until the shift was over. Oh, and the only “facilities” we ever had access to were porta-potties. When you work on crews of 500 men and you are the ONLY GIRL on staff, the porta-potties get grafittii of very “richly descriptive” poetry and drawings about all sorts of disgusting topics, including yourself!!…..and don’t get me started about the sexist treatment by the low-life, undereducated, uncouth construction worker crews (because “girls are only good for one thing”) All I ever dreampt about was working indoors in the air-conditioning or heat, in pretty clothes, with pretty nails and make-up on…with other humans who kept normal hours, had all their teeth and an education, and and sat at a cubicle in the quiet with a mug of coffee…and got to go to happy hour after work and still be clean and unflustered by the elements. The first time I ever had a job where I got to wear my own clothes (not industrial paper suits or paint-spattered sweats and T-shirts and steel-toed boots) was the greatest job I ever had….well the FIRST greatest job I ever had! I was working as a caricature artist in the lobby of the Polynesian Resort at Walt Disney World. I just got to sit in a chair and DRAW for a living, IN THE AIR-CONDITIONING listening to live ukelele music,,,,and getting tips!! Second best job I ever had was working in the soft-sculpture crafts department for the Jim Henson Company making muppets in NYC…and again it mostly had to do with the fact that I was inside and clean, wearing a dress and having nice hair (not to mention the pride of what I was actually getting to do for a living. Third best job was as an illustrator/renderer for a Landscape Design firm…back to wearing my own clothes in the air-conditioning and getting to draw all day for a living! Being a freelance fine-artist was generally great because I got to sleep in and paint all day, but I was GROSSLY poor and vending at art festivals (a LOT of them, for years and years) put me back out in the elements getting heat-exhaustion,,,and I eventually started getting bitter about being so poor and hot and stressed all the time that I was glad to take an office job doing landscape design instead. Steady paychecks have magical qualities to them.
Laura “Rarabird”, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I was raised in Ocoee, FL. My family sold 80 acres to Walt DIsney in the 1960s when he was buying up property under a false real estate name and building Walt Disney World. We kept a few acres around our house, but that menat that I was only a 15 minute drive to the back of the WDW property, and I could watch the 10pm fireworks from my bedroom window (it was like having a town church bell ring, you always knew what time it was by the sound of the fireworks). The neighborhoods that built up around my family property filled up with scenic and prop artists and ride designers when I was very young, and all my little playmate friends had artist parents who worked for the company (“The Rat” as it is called by native Orlandoans). I grew up taking art classes in their garages, and by the time I was 17 I was fully prepared and skilled with a thick portfolio to be a professional artist. I knew I wanted to make the them park attractions, and I didn’t think art school was the right path for me. My skills were of a more practical nature, rather than esoteric, meaningful or stylized, so I studied theatre arts (scenic-painting, props, costumes, mask and puppet-making) at the University of Florida. I minored in Horticulture because my dad had owned a tropical commerical greenhouse business, and I was totaly in love with plants. (He called me “Laurabird”, which became “Rarabird”, the name I use as my “Artist Nom De Plume”). This led to my getting my landscape design degree (combining art and desgin with horticulture and botany) at Columbia University in NYC. I had so many different skills, I could work anywhere in the country, and did a lot of theatre all over the USA, painting scenery, making props, masks at the Los Angeles Opera, puppets for JIm Henson in NYC…I even made mod clothes for a living in London for 3 years under my own design name “Mojo Gogo”, and BONUS…I got to have my own garden in England…the best climate for flower gardens on planet Earth. I was on the animatroinic animal painting team at Walt Disney World, the props, window display, decorating and scenic painting teams at DIsneyland. My proudest acheivement there were creating the scenery and props for The Enchanted Tiki Room Rehab for the 50th anniverysary of the park, making Pirates of the Caribbean movie promo window designs, and my final project was working on the “Ager And Grainer” paint team that made the Millenium Falcon ride look like the “fastest rusted hunk of junk in the galaxy.” For Jim Henson I got the build puppets and costumes for a live stage version of “Emmet Otter Jugband Christmas”. Honestly, was floating on CLoud 9 at that job the whole time I was there.
Another thing I was very proud of was being a full-time FIne Artist for the massive TIki culture in LA from the very beginning of the scene 20 years ago. I supplemented the ebb and flow of painting sales with a hairflower business that took over my life (MAN tiki-hairflowers are popular!!!! Yes, there are people who just do that for a living in LA, and I was one of them!). I took special pride in using my prop-and costume-crafting skills to make exquisite and complicated designs, and would like to say I was/am in the top 3 or 4 best Tiki hairflower makers in the country. The money to made from them is mad, and I love flowers, so it’s really hard to stop doing it and just focus on painting…..I have thousands of fans and customers that would hunt me down and kidnap me if I stopped. I was making like 3,000 of these things a year, no joke. I travel tovend at the Tiki conventions all over the country still, setting up my booth and making ladies feel like Primitiva Divas (that’s my hairflower brand). I’ve also worked at florists and done live floral container designing for very rich parts of the northeast (another job I LOOOOOOVED). I can work anywhere in the country, and I practically have!
Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
When I first started trying to figure out what career I wanted (I knew it had to be art), before I ended up going to University of Florida for Practical Theatre Arts, I did make an an attempt to become a graphic designer. I took a 2-year course for Commercial Art, and tried to learn the very early (1990!) versions of Adobe Pagemaker and Photoshop. While I was going to school, I saw a job posted on a bulletin board for prop-artists to work in a scenic shop, and got the job. I was so enriched and excited by the sites, smells, tools and projects that I got totally distracted form learning computer programs and never got very far with that skillset. I was sculpting pirateships out of foam with a hotwire and baby-strollers that looked like dolphins, and learning fiberglassing and resin-mudding…and WOW, it was really hard to want to sit in a chair and manipulate pixels. I got sucked into the scenic world with tools and materials that delighted me, and that made up my mind to follow the path that thrilled me. I wanted to make THINGS with my Hands, and so I did. Little did I know the perils that awaited me (see the first question answered in the this interview!). If I had become better at photoshop I would have been well-payed, air-conditioned, probably own a home…and be married for many years by now! But I guess it’s a trad- in for all the adventures and amazing things I accomplished and places I’ve lived .I still don’t know photoshop very well, DANG IT!!!! I can’t even make my own flyers for my art booth events! I have recently tried switching from running my own marketing on Etsy (been doing that with meager results for 10 years) to Artstorefronts,com. This website teaches you how to market yourself better (and if you pay enough, they’ll do it for you!). Alas, I’ve been involved in the care of my elderly parents an had to move to a remote state/town far from the things of man to do that life duty, so I haven’t fully engrossed myself in the benefits that I’m sure Artstorefronts could provide me. All things in good time. Life changes, and I’ll be better able to focus on that when those changes come to pass. I’m so glad we have the internet for marketing and promotion now. I have no idea how artists could have survived without it!
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
I’ve only ever wanted to be an artist. When the tiki scene began in LA, I jumped on it, leaving England to move to California. I started selling paintings right away, and I was hooked. I’d never sold art that was based on my own ideas before, I’d only ever been commanded by Disney Imagineers or theatre set designers to do their bidding. After about 3 tiki-themed paintings that sold, I decided I need a niche to make my work stand out among the handful of other burgeoning tiki fine artists I knew of. I had been known as a prop artist for the Enchanted Tikiroom, and people loved when I made paintings the birds and flowers from that attraction, but I discovered a passion that really meant something so much more than just interpreting Disney pop-art. I had gotten into Tarot and Astrology in California (shocking, I know….bunch of hippies…) and wanted to express the amazing illustrations of Tarot cards in Tiki paintings. This gave me a vast springboard of ideas, but with constrictions, and a mysterious world of symbolism and hidden meanings that I could express with a tiki-pop twist. My goal is to complete the 72-card series as tiki themes, and so far I’ve done about 30 with those themes strictly focused on in my artwork. Sometimes I’m thrown into a collective Ttiki art show that for the life of me i can’t figure out how to interpret into “Tiki-tarot”, but 95% of the time, I can work it in just fine. it’s a fun challenge!
Something I observed time and time again was how popular and lucrative designing and sellng ceramic tiki mugs is at these festivals, and I have found myself doing a handful of designs of my own mugs, based on details from my paintings. Funny, I started of in ceramics classes when I was 4 years old, back in the 70’s in garages in Orlando, and now I’m back to learning it again. It has many nuances and a complicated skill set (I’m just about to buy my own kiln and get serious about producing them en masse), but luckily I’m already a skilled sculptor and molding/casting professional, so really I only need to focus on learning glazing and firing with my own kiln.. And then watch out world! I’ll have those lines of a hundred people standing outside of MY booth for MY latest mug release. So, in conclusion, my goals are to complete the Tiki Tarot painting series, and hone my mug-producing side of Tiki art.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.rarabirdart.com, www,etsy.com/shop/rarabirdart. www.etsty.com/shop/primitivadiva
- Instagram: @RarabirdArt and @primitivadiva
- Facebook: Rarabird the PrimitivaDiva
Image Credits
All photos taken by me, except the one of me, taken by Kari Hendler,