Valerie Tamplin (b. 1942, Palo Alto, California) is a contemporary painter whose six-decade practice moves between abstraction, figuration, landscape, and still life, unified by an abiding attention to structural forces—the compression of mass, the behavior of light across form, and the architecture of physical contact.
Tamplin studied painting with Roger Kuntz and Phil Dike, art history with David Scott, and sculpture with Albert Stewart, at Scripps College before entering the San Francisco Art Institute, where she worked with Joan Brown during Brown's tenure at the center of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. From 1971 to 1973, Tamplin undertook intensive study at the Art Students League of New York under three instructors whose combined teaching provided a triangulated foundation in painting: Robert Beverly Hale in artistic anatomy and figure construction, Vaclav Vytlacil in abstract composition and spatial dynamics—extending the Hofmann tradition Vytlacil had brought from Munich—and Ben Cunningham in color theory and perceptual structure.
From 1989 to 1991, Tamplin continued her study of painting with Mark Wethli and Ann Lofquist at Bowdoin College.
This training produced a practice grounded in anatomical knowledge, spatial organization, and chromatic discipline—three axes that remain visible across Tamplin's work regardless of subject or mode. The figurative paintings carry the structural logic of Hale's teaching; the abstract compositions build space through the relational dynamics Vytlacil emphasized; and the restricted palettes of recent work reflect a systematic approach to color rooted in Cunningham's perceptual methods.
Recent paintings extend a long-running engagement with gestural abstraction, exploring interlocking form and the physics of contact through compressed compositional fields. Sienna-toned works develop radiating structures that emerge from and dissolve into the picture plane, while black-and-white compositions investigate the boundary between architectural and organic form.
Tamplin lives and works in Brunswick, Maine.