Valerie Tamplin (born 1942, Palo Alto, California) is a contemporary painter based in Maine whose artistic practice encompasses drawing, painting, assemblage, and collage. Working primarily in oil and acrylic on canvas, gesso board, and panels, as well as watercolor and inks on paper, Tamplin also creates constructions utilizing found wood pieces, objects, and metal scraps mounted on wood panels and cardboard. She is best known for her finished surfaces, attention to detail, and the sensation of light emanating from her paintings. Her work reflects a command of anatomy and classical rendering techniques. 

Tamplin’s paintings explore the New England coastal landscape, the human body at rest or in motion, and the juxtaposition of pattern, texture, and color in both abstract and objective compositions. Her focus centers on the natural world in coastal settings as expressive of timeless opposing forces; she addresses the  complexity and dignity of the human form. Important projects include her drawings of nudes and resultant paintings developed from her studies with Robert Beverly Hale, and the martial arts grapplers observed in a dojo and rendered in acrylic paintings. Her color palette ranges from black and white abstractions to blue-based figurative and landscape paintings, with recurring themes of curvilinear lines such as spirals..

Tamplin has exhibited in numerous venues including the Juried Show “Faces and Figures” at the Chocolate Church in Bath, Maine, and in the Casco Bay Art League exhibitions in Brunswick, Maine,  and in juried exhibitions at Maine Art Gallery in Wiscasset, Maine, Memorial Hospital in Long Beach, California, the Palo Alto Art Club in California, and in a solo exhibition at Loft Event in Boston, Massachusetts. She also held an artist residency at West Harpswell School, Maine,and designed curriculum and projects for elementary grades. Her commissioned pieces are on permanent view at Senter Place in Brunswick, Maine; her work is housed in  private collections in Texas, California, Colorado, Maine, and New York.