'Elvis has the perfect face': This Tennessee artist has created 20,000 images of the King

John Beifuss
Memphis Commercial Appeal

For most of the 74 years of her life, Betty Harper has been drawn to Elvis.

More than that: For most of the 74 years of her life, Betty Harper has drawn Elvis. 

The Nashville-based commercial artist is Elvis Presley's most ardent and prolific portraitist. She estimates she has created more than 20,000 images of the King, in pencil, pen, pastel, charcoal, oils, acrylics and even rice. 

Artist Betty Harper poses with a portrait she created of Elvis Presley in the gift shop of The Guest House at Graceland in Memphis, Tenn., on Thursday, Jan. 7, 2021.

"Any time I wanted to do something out of my ordinary style, Elvis would be what I used," she said, referencing an experiment in rice art, when she used dyed grains to create a mosaic portrait of the face that launched a thousand (worshipful) shrieks.

Harper said she never tires of trying to transfer Elvis to paper, as faithfully as possible. His curled lip, his pompadour or sideburns, and his laughing eyes are a source of perpetual pleasure.

Artwork of Elvis Presley created by Betty Harper of Nashville

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"If you want to talk about perfect faces, I think there’s two," Harper said. "On the women's side, it's Elizabeth Taylor. You can take that face apart, and it's perfect, every part of it. On the male side, it's Elvis. Elvis has the perfect face."

A longtime associate of Graceland, Harper is in Memphis this week for the annual celebration of Elvis Presley's Jan. 8, 1935, birthday. While the party culminates with a limited-seating, sold-out public cake-cutting Friday morning, Harper mostly will be based at The Guest House at Graceland. From 1-4 p.m. Friday and Saturday, she will be in the hotel's gift shop, signing autographs and selling post cards, calendars, prints and original artwork, most of which will have an Elvis theme.

"She has a real following through her art," said Jack Soden, longtime CEO for Elvis Presley Enterprises. "Sometimes she's inspired by famous photographs, but it seems to me her creativity is not only a kind of Norman Rockwell-degree of accuracy but creating a feeling that fans respond to."

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Self-taught artist

The Florida-born daughter of an Air Force officer whose duties took the family all over the world, Harper says she first saw Elvis when the young rockabilly singer from Memphis made his first network television appearance on Jan. 28, 1956, on "Stage Show," a program hosted by Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey that aired live on CBS.

"My dad said, 'That kid is gonna make a million dollars.' My parents liked him right off the bat, which was helpful." 

Artwork of Elvis Presley created by Betty Harper of Nashville

A self-taught artist, Harper always liked to draw, but she mostly sketched animals and comic-strip characters and other kid-friendly subjects until one day in elementary school when she tried her hand at Roy Rogers. The picture of the singing cowboy she drew in her Big Chief tablet was a hit; so, at the age of 9, she drew her first Elvis. After that, she never stopped.

"We kind of evolved together," Harper said. "I also drew Ricky Nelson, pretty much everybody that was popular. But if it was Ricky or Frankie Avalon or whoever, I drew them three of four times, and they just started looking the same. But every time I drew Elvis, he looked different.

"After he died, I started thinking about it, and contemplating. I realized that because of when I started with him and because I stayed with him, all those years with my drawing, he was my way of expressing everything. I wasn't a talker and I did all my expressing with my pencils. He was just an extension of whether I felt bad this day, or whatever problems I was having as a teenager, or with boyfriends, or whatever. We just grew up together through the years, and I felt like I could express my emotions through Elvis."

Artwork of Elvis Presley created by Betty Harper of Nashville

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Harper draws in a realistic style. She doesn't caricature Elvis, or "deconstruct" him, or "appropriate" his image in unusual ways, as Andy Warhol did with his 1963 "Triple Elvis" painting (which sold at auction in 2014 for $81.9 million).

Instead, at public appearances and through her website (bettyharper.com), she gives fans what they want: a keepsake rendition, with every rhinestone, sideburn and eyelash in place, of the performer who captured their heart, whether they discovered the King during his lifetime or after his Aug. 16, 1977, death at 42. 

Harper said she imbues each portrait with "feeling" as well as accuracy. "When they look at it, I want them not only to recognize him but to get a feeling. I want them to feel him.

"A big thing on drawing people is, you gotta get the eyes," she said. "If you don't get the eyes you might as well stop because it's not going anywhere."

Artwork of Elvis Presley created by Betty Harper of Nashville

More of Betty Harper's art

A longtime commercial artist with five children (she'll drive to Memphis this week with her daughter, Loretta Lynn Harper, named for the country singer who is Harper's friend), Harper moved to Nashville in 1971 and has managed to earn a living with her pencils and paints, designing record labels and doing album covers for such artists as Jim Reeves, Kitty Wells and Waylon Jennings.

On her website, she offers portraits of many entertainers, including Billie Holiday, Hank Williams, Shirley Temple and George "Gabby" Hayes. But she's more or less specialized in Elvis ever since 1978, when Graceland, the Naegele sign company and the Convention & Visitors Bureau sponsored a billboard showcasing her art near Elvis' mansion, for the first "Elvis Week." Titled "American Trilogy," in reference to one of Presley's signature concert numbers, the artwork depicted Three Faces of Elvis, from the 1950s through the '70s.

"They put us in one of those what they call cherry pickers and hoisted us up and we had to pull a cord and unveil the sign," said Harper, who said she learned about Elvis' death the previous year when a "special news bulletin" interrupted her afternoon viewing of "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C."

Frequently, Harper accepts commissions to create original Elvis portraits for fans. "The big request is to have them or their wife or their friend in a picture with Elvis, as if it actually happened."

Harper said she works on Elvis art "almost every day."

"Since the pandemic, I've probably done almost a hundred pictures of Elvis," she said. "It's kind of relaxing. It's like comfort food. You know the face so well."

Soden said artistic representations of Elvis are hardly a "new phenomenon," as a tour of the Graceland archives would reveal.

"Since we opened Graceland, people have painted all kinds of interpretations of Elvis," he said. "And during Elvis' lifetime, people sent Elvis paintings all the time, and he kept a lot of them.

"What Elvis appreciated, it appears, was the effort that went into it. He wasn't so much an art critic as he was appreciative of the fans who took the time to do a drawing or a painting of him."

Harper said she saw Elvis in concert in 1975 in Murfreesboro, but never met the singer. However, she did get to meet Roy Rogers, in Knoxville in 1996, two years before his death. She presented the movie and TV cowboy with a portrait that she said was a big improvement over the Roy Rogers drawing she'd done decades earlier on her tablet. 

"He said, 'That is the best drawing I've ever seen of myself,' and I couldn't say a word. Tears just started rolling out of my eyes. I just felt like I'd come full circle, to meet the first person I'd ever drawn."

ELVIS BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION AT GRACELAND

Friday, Jan. 8.

9 a.m.: Official proclamation and cake-cutting ceremony

3 p.m.: "Elvis Unplugged" concert featuring Elvis tribute artist Dean Z

7 p.m.: "Hidden Graceland" after-hours tour led by archivist Angie Marchese and Elvis expert Tom Brown

Visit graceland.com/elvis-birthday for tickets and more information.