#Emma taply free#

From a distance, untitled (pond, tree, rain, feather), 1999, looks as if it had been accidentally hung sideways. The play of reflections often serves to afford the spatial ambiguities that animate many of Tapley's best paintings. A striking close-up of a flickering fire isolated in darkness with no clues as to relative scale, it could be anything from a tiny match flame to a huge conflagration, but it's mostly a celebration of its own paradoxically modest form of painterly bravura. Untitled (flame), 1999, swerves away from the landscape genre toward a kind of abstraction. But there are also precise though not finicky renderings of minute det ails, like the complex reflections on the water's surface in untitled (Asamuck Creek), 1999. (I wonder if she's studied, for instance, the too-little-known landscapes of Giorgio Morandi.) There are highly atmospheric views across boundless distances, as in untitled (fog, mountain), 1999, in which a watery blue-gray mist envelops everything almost to the point of illegibility. In some paintings Tapley's sympathies with Romanticism in general, and American luminism in particular, ate evident, but elsewhere she works with the compressed space of modernist painting. She's clearly examined the work of the most astute contemporary landscape painters-there are possible influences from Helen Miranda Wilson, Jane Wilson, even Rackstraw Downes, though the terrain she's chosen is quite different from his industrial exurbia. She can handle open compositions with few elements and a large internal scale as well as crowded ones that seem to have been painstakingly pieced together. Otherwise, as I said, Tapley's stylistic resources are various. It's as if each one has deposited the least necessary quantum of paint, so that the visible trace remains as nearly devoid of substance and dimensionality as possible. That's not to say that Tapley completely effaces any trace of her hand, however the individual brushstroke can sometimes be quite evident, though minute. Although photographs may well enter into the preparatory stage of Tapley's working process, the paintings themselves are not notably photographic in feeling (except insofar as we lazily associate any form of illusionistic realism with the camera), but they resemble photographs in the way the image seems to inhere in a homogeneous surface, as in an emulsion. Retrieved from īeyond their scale and genre, Emma Tapley's small, realist landscape paintings, all but two of the fifteen on view from 1999, have little more in common than their surface quality, which is of an almost perfect smoothness and even density. 2000 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

#Emma taply free#

MLA style: 'EMMA TAPLEY.' The Free Library.