Saralene Tapley

Saralene Tapley’s Gallery

‘Blue Portrait,’ acrylic on canvas, 26 x 30 inches, 2025

‘Crimson Nude,’ acrylic on canvas, 20 x 36 inches, 2024

‘Nude Dancing in Lavender,’ acrylic on canvas, 35 x 20 inches, 2024

‘Indigo Nude,’ acrylic on canvas, 63 x 43 inches, 2024

‘Nude Resting Against Blue,’ acrylic on canvas, 65 x 48 inches, 2024

‘Orange Nude,’ acrylic on canvas, 48 x 35 inches, 2024

‘Sleeping Nude,’ acrylic on canvas, 24 x 38 inches, 2024

Reclining Nude 3, acrylic on canvas, 39.5 x 47.5 inches, 2025

Awaiting, acrylic on canvas, 39.5 x 46.5 inches, 2025

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It’s difficult for me to express what my work is about as I often follow in the direction that I am pulled. I must say my final pursuit in each piece that I create is to find the beauty of the human experience. My work is sometimes portraiture, sometimes full figures and nudes and occasionally still life. I create a lot of portrait commissions in which likeness is paramount, but I also create work for fun in which I express myself freely without much regard to physical representation. This has created two avenues in my work. For this publication, I am submitting a selection of my looser works. I call these my ‘gestures.’ These expressive works are more intuitive and impulsive. I let the paint do what it likes and follow my hand. I enjoy my mistakes and happy accidents hoping that the end result will appear to me almost magically. I am very interested in contemporary figurative painters including the well-known: Jenny Saville, Alice Neel and Lucian Freud. Recently, I have enjoyed a lot of Tracy Emin and Colin Davidson. I have also had the privilege to train under contemporary greats at the New York Academy of Art: Bernardo Siciliano, Kurt Kauper and Michael Grimaldi. I recently visited the Vincent Valdez exhibition at CAMH and the Tamara de Lempicka exhibition at MFAH which I really enjoyed.

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I am a figurative artist that has been living in the Houston area for the past 20 years. I moved here in 2005 after living in Ireland, England, Taiwan, and Korea. Much of my childhood was spent in the United States, and I was born here. However, my Mother is American and my father is Irish. They had difficulty planting their roots in one place, so we moved every 3-4 years. I competed my BFA in Painting at Dublin, Ireland’s National College of Art and Design and lived there several more years occupying studios at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios and Phoenix Studios. My early work responded to my youth growing up in Asia. I, then, transitioned almost completely into portraiture and figurative painting. My BFA program really discouraged painting, so much of my undergrad work is drawing. After finishing my BFA, I realized how much I loved to paint and decided to experiment and learn as much as I could about painting by myself. I’ve explored numerous styles of paint application from pointillism, expressionism, cubist type work, works on paper, life painting, oils, acrylic, and more. I try to continually learn and improve, so my application of paint seems to evolve with that desire. In 2014, I moved to New York City for three years and obtained my MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art. I loved the programs. They offered extensive classical training in anatomy, life drawing, painting, art history, contemporary art studies, composition, portraiture and more. It was really the place for me I felt. I felt I got a lot of training that I wasn’t able to achieve on my own. I was even awarded a residency to Russia. I left New York in 2017 and moved back to the Houston area. I have since lectured and exhibited throughout Houston, Galveston and surrounding areas.