emma tapley: arcadia

EXHIBITION DATES: November 25 – December 20, 2025

RECEPTION: Thursday, December 4, 5 - 8 pm

The Painting Center is pleased to present Arcadia, a solo exhibition by Emma Tapley in the Main Gallery. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, November 25, and runs through Saturday, December 20, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, December 4, from 5 to 8 pm.

In Arcadia, Emma Tapley immerses herself in the familial landscape and situates her practice within the long tradition of landscape painting in the Catskills. Painted directly from life on land once tended by her father, a painter who shaped her earliest understanding of art, the series transforms personal inheritance into philosophy. Each work captures the fleeting transitions of the natural world, the movement of air across water, the shift of shadow through branches, and the quiet passage of time that defines a living place. Tapley’s paintings hold these moments with extraordinary stillness, exploring the balance between observation and emotion, between the world perceived and the world remembered. Arcadia is not a retreat from life but a deep participation in it, a sustained practice of looking through which transience becomes form and the passing moment finds continuity.

Tapley’s art continues the American landscape tradition begun by Thomas Cole and developed through the quiet precision of Luminism and the inward spirituality of George Inness. Yet her Arcadia belongs fully to the present. Her vision is neither nostalgic nor idealized; it emerges from the act of direct observation, from patient hours of attention until the world begins to clarify itself through paint. Horizons soften, reflections merge with reality, and trees blur into the haze of their own movement. Each painting becomes a record of perception unfolding in real time, a conversation between artist, place, and moment.

Tapley’s connection to the Catskills is both intimate and enduring. The land she paints was once her father’s, and caring for it after his passing became a form of devotion. “At first it felt like I was still caring for him,” she recalls, “but now I am caring for the place itself.” That quiet responsibility shapes her entire practice. Her canvases are less representations of landscape than acts of companionship with it. In this way, Arcadia extends the pastoral lineage of American painting into a contemporary language of presence. Tapley’s work reminds us that painting remains a vital means of recording how we see and how seeing connects us to the living world. Her landscapes do not seek paradise; they locate it in the quiet persistence of seeing.

Emma Tapley is an American painter whose work explores perception, memory, and the natural world. She studied at The School of Visual Arts and has exhibited widely throughout the United States. Tapley divides her time between New York City and her Catskills home, where she continues to expand the expressive and philosophical language of landscape painting.