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SHELDON TAPLEY
(American, born Venezuela, 1959)
House of Cards, 1997
Pastel on paper
24 15/16 x 35 7/8”
Purchase and Docent Art Fund 1998.1.2

Born in Venezuela to British parents, artist Sheldon Tapley was raised in Europe and North America. He received his B.A. from Grinnell College, in Grinnell, Iowa, and his M.F.A. from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Currently an associate professor of art at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, Tapley has become well known for pastels of panoramic landscapes and backyard gardens. His focus on the natural world recently shifted to still life subjects, in which nature is isolated, contained, and arranged. House of Cards features traditional still life components and the miscellany common to artists’ studios. On the far wall are art reproductions of Jean-Siméon Chardin’s Card Players and Paul Cézanne’s Still Life with Skulls, which hang alongside the artist’s own figure sketches and landscape pastels. In this painting, Tapley incorporates conventional symbols—a fragile house of cards, a delicate egg, fresh flowers, and fruits, Cézanne’s skulls—with more current allusions to destruction to create a contemporary meditation on the transience of life and the inevitability of death.