Artist: Thelma Appel
Title: Meeting Plaza
Year created: 2018
Medium: Color Silkscreen on 320 coventry paper
Edition: from the limited edition of 75.
Height (inches): 23
Width (inches): 29
Depth (inches): 1
Pencil signed at the front of the art and numbered by the artist on the recto (front).
This piece is framed.
Description of piece:
Meeting Plaza is based on Appel's eponymous oil painting, first exhibited by the Chashama Foundation on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan - near Rockefeller Center. The artist explained: "When I first conceived the idea for this painting, I had in mind a city setting; perhaps people ice skating in Rockefeller Center in NYC - a famous tourist attraction, and so iconic to my memory of once living in this vibrant city. As I perused through various references and began to block out preliminary shapes of buildings, trees and people, I realized that what I was actually wanting to convey was a city that welcomed all nationalities and all people. I added flags hoisted on poles, which I believe corresponded rhythmically to the late autumn trees, almost barren of leaves. The flags for me are a counterpoint to the city’s geometric architecture, and their suggested movement and irregular shapes echo the organic morphology of the people below. I painted an evening sky. It is dusk. Nobody is rushing. People are conversing with each other, walking slowly or gathering in small groups enjoying a calm evening in the city, in a place that is reminiscent of The United Nations, and Rockefeller Center —an obvious public setting, yet more intimate. This is how I want to remember my time in the city. I too, am one of the people converging at the 'Meeting Plaza' ..."
Artist bio:
Thelma Appel is a representational and abstract painter who has been working and teaching for more than six decades. Now in her 80s, her work is being re-discovered by a new generation of collectors. Appel was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, raised in Darjeeling, India, and educated in London, England at St. Martin's School of Art with a Diploma of Art and Design and Hornsey College of Art in London, with an Art Teacher’s certification. She emigrated to the United States in the 1960s, settling in Bennington, Vermont. In 1974 Appel was awarded a Yaddo Fellowship. The following year, she and painter Carol Haerer co-founded the Bennington College Summer Painting Workshop, where many distinguished painters of the day 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. She has taught drawing at Parsons School of Design and painting at Southern Vermont College and the University of Connecticut. Her work has been exhibited at the Bennington Museum, the Berkshire Museum, the Children's Museum of the Arts, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Robert Hull Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont, among other venues. In the 1980s, Appel was represented by the renowned Jill Kornblee Gallery and later Fischbach Gallery on West 57th Street. In 2014 Appel was awarded a solo show by the Chashama Foundation: Thelma Appel: Landscapes and Cityscapes. In 2019, the curators of the Art New York fair at Pier 94 chose works from her Times Square series of paintings for their public project exhibition space sponsored by Absolut vodka, and in the Fall of 2019 the curator of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in collaboration with Chashama Foundation selected Appel's. Times Square series to be exhibited in a solo show at their Project Find space – a public exhibition at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. From October 2019 to February 2020, the Brattleboro Museum in Vermont is hosting a career survey of Appel’s work entitled Thelma Appel: Abstract/Observed curated by Mara Williams.