Install Flash to Experience Full Website   |   Home   |   About the Artist   |   Still Lifes   |   Figures & Portraits

Sheldon Tapley, Painter

About the Artist

“The works are intelligently composed and executed with polished skill.”
—The New Yorker, October 19, 1998

“All of Tapley's work is marked by a unique poetic quality in which the past and the present simultaneously exist.”
—American Artist, November 1999

“Out of this brimming disarray emerges an image that is astonishingly well-ordered and beautiful.”
—John W. Streetman III, Director, Evansville Museum

Sheldon Tapley is a painter, draftsman and teacher. Nationally known for his still-life paintings, he worked in abstraction before finding his enduring love of realism, and was a landscapist before turning to still life. His art depicts familiar objects in lively, complex compositions.

The images “have a magical believability”, says Peter Tatistcheff, well-known founder of Tatistcheff Gallery, which was for more than thirty years, until it's director's recent retirement, one of America's most prominent venues of contemporary realist painting. Tapley's first New York solo show there, in 1998, was reviewed in The New Yorker and recommended to readers in the following issue of the magazine.

Tatistcheff Gallery presented another solo exhibition in 2002, and sent works to a 2004 exhibition at the Evansville Museum of Art. That show included thirty of Tapley's still lifes from the previous ten years; many of the works shown were loans from museum, academic, corporate and private collections across the United States. Tapley's works were recently seen at another museum show in March and April of 2008, at the Center for Contemporary Art in Sacramento.

The Evansville Museum honored Tapley as the Martha & Merrit deJong Memorial Artist-in-Residence in 2004. He received a 1998 Al Smith Fellowship from the The Kentucky Arts Council. He has held an endowed professorship at Centre College since 2002, and is now the Stodghill Professor of Painting and Drawing.

“Tapley masterfully blends the discipline of a hard-earned classical technique with a vision that is thoroughly modern and personal,” wrote Bill Creevy in a feature article for American Artist, November 1999. The artist's pastel, Jury Rig, was on the cover of the magazine.

Kentucky Educational Television presented Tapley in the 2001 series Looking at Painting. He was filmed at work in his studio and at the Speed Museum in Louisville, discussing a still life painting by Cézanne.

In addition to exhibiting landscape and still life images for the last two decades, Tapley has taught throughout his career. “Working with students and seeing things through their eyes keeps drawing fresh for me” says Tapley. He often works alongside his students, drawing or painting from a model. Over the past several years, the figure has become a more important subject in his work.

Tapley lives in Danville, Kentucky, near the campus of Centre College. He and his wife, Ann Silver, raised their two children there. He was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, in 1959, to British parents, and raised in Europe and North America.