Paul Tapia

Paul Tapia was born in San Francisco in 1940. At an early age he excelled in art class. He also stood out in sports, but his interest in art never waned. He turned down several five-figure major league bonus offers for his pitching talent. He set national passing records as a high school quarterback. He even turned down an offer to play quarterback for John Madden (the coach did wind up with a silver and black Tapia abstract).

Tapia’s career evolved through the 1960’s with gallery exhibitions and many juried awards. At age 26 he was featured in “Who’s Who in Art in America.” As his reputation widened he had his own TV show in his hometown of San Francisco, “Talkin’ About Art with Paul Tapia.” He taught formal and classical composition at the prestigious San Francisco Conservatory of Art, and continued to share his art knowledge with lectures touring colleges around the country.

He refers to his listed resume and his accomplishments as “just a bunch of paper. None of that stuff really matters when I am painting. What really matters is what happens when what’s in my head explodes in a controlled manner onto the canvas. The weird thing is I am confident in knowing when a painting is done. Actually a painting is never really ‘done’...the artist simply reaches what I refer to as a comfortable point of abandonment.”

About the Artist’s Work

There are three main reasons people find Paul Tapia’s abstracts pleasing to the eye.

First, the pure clean color. The colors are never muddy. Tapia is a master of working wet on wet, and he is always in complete control of the paint to canvas process.

Secondly, his complete understanding of the elements of composition is confidently and deftly applied to his paintings. Composition is simply controlling the visual interrelationship of two-dimensional shapes and three-dimensional forms within the canvas.

Thirdly, the “self illuminating” effect in Tapia’s abstracts is created by the application of the lightest lights, the darkest darks and the purest color into the focal point. This area is referred to by the Old Masters as the “emphatic area.”

Finally, it takes more than natural talent and acquired knowledge to create a powerful abstract painting. Tapia says “you’ve got to have ‘guts’ to apply multiple tubes of paint with one stroke.” This combination adds up to one of the most dynamic abstract artists alive today.