Biography

William Gouin Tapley was born in Eldorado, Arkansas, and grew up in Sulphur Springs, Texas, graduating from high school. He worked for a year as an engineering illustrator for an aircraft manufacturing company in Greenville, Texas, while studying geometry at East Texas State University nights in Commerce, Texas. Then he transferred to Baylor University, graduating BA with majors in experimental perceptual psychology and art, and minor in philosophy.

The next year as a graduate student at l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris his painting instructor encouraged him to focus on color expression, and he continued that specialization the following year at the Sir John Cass School of art in London and the next year as a full-time graduate student at the Royal Academy of Art, while enjoying the proceeds of the Jeremy Cubitt Prize for Painting. He exhibited that year and the previous year at the Federation of British Artists Gallery, and later at the Redfern Art Gallery. He also taught art therapy at Tower Hamlets College, London.

Later on he moved to New York City and taught color at Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts. In 1968 he began experimenting with environmental color by making paintings which completely surround the viewer. Over the next decade he produced about 100 of these murals in New York City, Washington DC, Pennsysvania, Massachusettes, Texas, and California. Many of them were reviewed in Look, Progressive Architecture, Industrial design, Philadelphia Magazine, Interiors Magazine, The Herald, Interior design Magazine, the New York Times, and Underground Interiors.

All of Tapley's paintings have been color studies, and at the same time many paintings have focused on one or another visual world in which to study. In 1979 he exhibited many of his studies for his environmental paintings and studio paintings inspired by those environmental paintings.

The 1984 Bridge Paintings show was an attempt to express the feeling of being between two states or two sides of the river with color transitions.

Studies from Life in 1987 was a study of the 'whole' color of any view and the subdivision of that color into its constituent colors. People Sitting in a Room were shown in 1990.

Street Paintings were studies of the prismatic nature of gray, especially when seen in daylight. They were shown in 1994 in my Loft Gallery, then at Main Street Arts, Nyack, NY, in 1995.

181 Studies of Two-Color Relationships were first shown all together in 2006.

William Tapley still teaches color at the School of Visual Arts, works as a free-lance color and painting consultant, and exhibits his paintings mainly in his Chelsea Loft Gallery.