Josh Brown

Laughing Donkey on Green

2022

Thelma Appel Nightfall, 1973 Acrylic and Oil on Canvas. Hand Signed. Framed. Hand signed and titled on the back Unique Frame included Museum Provenance. This work was originally sold in 1973 by the prestigious Jill Kornblee Gallery to a corporate collection, and, in 2019, it was featured in the Thelma Appel 50 year career survey at the Brattleboro Museum in Vermont – so the provenance is superb. Measurements: Framed 38.5 x 89.5 inches Artwork 36.5 x 87.5 inches Thelma Appel Biography: A co-founder of the Bennington College Summer Painting Workshop, Thelma Appel is a representational and abstract painter who has been practicing art for more than six and a half decades. In the 1980s, Thelma Appel was represented by the renowned Jill Kornblee Gallery and, after Ms. Kornblee retired, Appel joined the legendary Fischbach Gallery, (the gallery of record for Alex Katz for many decades,) also on West 57th Street, before they shuttered. After leaving Manhattan, she retreated from the art world for several decades; however, in recent years, her work is being rediscovered by a generation of new collectors. A beloved and popular teacher, at 87 years of age, Thelma could still be found teaching “The Art of Painting” at Artsplace in Cheshire, CT. and at the Osher Life Long Learning Institute (OLLI) At the University of Connecticut, near her home during the 2024-5 Fall/Winter Semester. In 2019, she was subject of a 50-year career survey (October, 2019 -February 2020) at the Brattleboro Museum in Vermont, entitled Thelma Appel: Abstract/Observed curated by Mara Williams. She has also exhibited at the Mattatuck Museum in Connecticut, which acquired one of her fabric collages for their permanent collection, the Bennington Museum in Vermont and the Police Museum in Lower Manhattan. Thelma Appel was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, but following her parents’ divorce, her father remained in Israel, but her mother emigrated to London to pursue a career as a journalist. However, she soon became ill, and Thelma was sent alone to be educated in a Protestant missionary schools in Darjeeling, India, a geographical displacement that would impact her life and her work. Thelma returned to London, England, to study art at the legendary St. Martin's School of Art (later Central St. Martins) and Hornsey College of Art, under such renowned teachers as Joe Tilson and Eduardo Paolozzi, before emigrating to the United States in the 1960s. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues, including the Bennington Museum, the Berkshire Museum in North Adams, Mass., the Children's Museum of the Arts in New York City, the Mattatuck Museum, the Brattleboro Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Robert Hull Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont and the University of Pennsylvania Fine Arts Gallery. In 1974 she was awarded a YADDO Fellowship, and in 1975, Thelma Appel, along with the painter Carol Haerer, co-founded the Bennington College Summer Painting Workshop, where many distinguished painters of the day, both abstract and representational, conducted master classes. Among them were Neil Welliver, John Button, Alice Neel, Larry Poons, Friedel Dzubas, Stanley Boxer, Elizabeth Murray and Doug Ohlson – a program that continued until 1980. (One of Thelma’s students was the renowned art dealer Matthew Marks.) She has also taught drawing at Parsons School of Design, painting at Southern Vermont College and at the University of Connecticut. Appel’s work has been presented at Art on Paper, Texas Contemporary, Market Art & Design in Bridgehampton and Art New York art fair, which selected Appel’s Times Square series of paintings for their invitational public Project Space sponsored by Absolut Vodka. She was one of the winning artists of the juried exhibition “Pets of the Pandemic” juried by art historian and critic David Cohen, publisher and editor of artcritical, who cited it for special commendation as a “masterful portrait”. In recent years, Thelma’s work has been exhibited in both one-person and group shows at Alpha 137 Gallery in New York, Sager Reeves (now Sager Braudis) Gallery in Missouri, the Chashama Foundation in New York City, as well as the Five Points Gallery and Center for the Visual Arts in Torrington Connecticut, the David M. Hunt Gallery in Falls Village, CT and Wisdom House in Litchfield Ct...

Series: Pop Oil Enamel Paint on Canvas I consider each colored dot to be like a person. You and me and everyone. Together we all make up that image shown. You will notice that in my...