CÉCILE VAN HANJA

The Blue Hour

2023

Born in Corsica, Cecile van Hanja spent her childhood in France before moving to the Netherlands as a child. Inspired by Piet Mondrian, the De Stijl m...

Born in Corsica, Cecile van Hanja spent her childhood in France before moving to the Netherlands as a child. Inspired by Piet Mondrian, the De Stijl m...

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...

As one of the last generation to remember a childhood lived in the desert hunting and gathering with her family, Walangkura Napanangka's paintings recall the stories of country and the location of specific sites in her traditional homeland west of the salt lake of Karrkurutinjinya (Lake Macdonald). Born around 1946, at Tjitururrnga west of Kintore, in the remote and arid country between the Northern Territory and Western Australia, she lived with her father Rantji Tjapangati and mother Inyuwa Nampitjinpa and later, while still a teenager, travelled by foot with her family over the hundreds of kilometres from their remote desert home eventually joining Uta Uta Tjangala's group as they walked in to the settlements of Haasts Bluff and then Papunya. The lure of settlement life with its promise of plentiful food and water belied the harsh conversion they would make to an alien lifestyle with its many problems and unfamiliar demands. The upheaval however, was ameliorated to some degree by the proximity of her immediate family including her mother Inyuwa, adoptive father Tutuma Tjapangati, and sister Pirrmangka Napanangka (now deceased) all of whom became artists. Relocated to the community of Kintore in 1981 when the outstation movement began, Walangkura participated in the historic women's collaborative painting project (1994) that was initiated by the older women as a means of re-affirming their own spiritual and ancestral roots. It was a time of specifically female singing, ceremony and painting, away from the gaze of outsiders and men folk. The huge and colourful canvases that emerged from the women's camp were 'alive with the ritual excitement and narrative intensity of the occasion' (Johnson 2000: 197). Within a year, Papunya Tula Artists, now established at Kintore, had taken on many of these women as full-time artists, revitalising the company after the deaths of many of the original 'painting men'. While individual women forged their own stylistic trajectory, these paintings were immediately distinguishable from the men's more cerebral and symmetrical style. They radiated an exuberant and vibrant energy, the felt heart-beat of women's affinity to country and spirit. Walangkura's early works, created from 1996 onward, are characterized by masses of small markings and motifs covering large areas of canvas. Her favorite colour, a deep sandy orange predominates, accentuated against more somber blacks and reds and dusky greens or yellows. More recent works show a gestural quality though still tightly packed with an intensity of geometric line work representing sandhills. In a sense this provides a strong visual and contextual link to the men's linear style as exemplified by the works of George Tjungurrayi...