Thelma Appel, Rescued Doll, with Flower Vase, 2016

Thelma Appel

Rescued Doll, with Flower Vase, 2016

Pastel on paper drawing

Signed on the back of the artwork; also signed and titled by artist on the back of the accompanying board; undated

Unique

24 × 18 inches

Unframed

Pastel on paper drawing
Signed on the back and also signed and titled by the artist on an accompanying board
The artist said "Rescued Doll" based upon a child's doll, that she found inexplicably near some garbage bins in her neighborhood, which she literally rescued and memorialized in art. This work was exhibited in 2019 at "Thelma Appel: Landscapes, Cityscapes + Biblical Journeys" at the Edward & Bernice Wenger Center for the Arts in Greenvale, New York, curated by art advisor and curator, Susan Seelig.
Provenance: the artist
Unframed
A co-founder of the Bennington College Summer Painting Workshop, Thelma Appel is a representational and abstract painter who has been working and teaching for more than six decades. 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. Thelma Appel was raised in Darjeeling, India and educated in London, England, at St. Martin's School of Art (now Central St. Martins) and Hornsey College of Art 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. 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, and has been exhibited in both one-person and group shows at Alpha 137 Gallery in New York, Sager Reeves Gallery in Missouri, the Chashama Foundation in New York City, as well as the Four Points Gallery in Connecticut. Her work was singled out for special commendation as a “masterful portrait” by art historian David Cohen, publisher and editor of artcritical in the juried exhibition “Pets of the Pandemic”. Appel's work is in the permanent collection of many museums including the Mattatuck Museum, where here work is often selected as an audience favorite.