Thelma Appel The Magician 2018, 18 Color Silkscreen on 320 gram Coventry Rag paper. Pencil signed, titled and numbered with COA. Unframed.

Note: this work is sold unframed. An image of the work framed, and installation shots of the Art on Paper fair where the print was debuted, are for inspiration only. 

Combining her background in illustration, abstraction, landscape, figuration, and her interest in mysticism and Kabbalah - Thelma Appel presents a unique interpretation of the Major Arcana archetype of the ages old Tarot deck: "The Magician", a stunning 18 color hand signed and numbered silkscreen on 320 gram Coventry Rag, paper. The work was printed by Gary Lichtenstein Editions, and it was based upon Thelma Appel's eponymous large painting. "Gary Lichtenstein is a superb professional and a meticulous craftsman; an artist could not ask for a better collaborator," says Appel. "I've admired the work he did with so many artists ranging from Robert Indiana to Carole Feuerman and Marina Abramovic. It was a real pleasure having the opportunity to work with him as well." With “The Magician”,  Appel reimagines the archetype of the master manifester of the Rider Waite deck as a great artist - the late modernist sculptor Isaac Witkin, known as the artist's artist, and the sculptor's sculptor, who "created magic from steel and bronze and stone". Yet at the height of his success, Witkin voluntarily left the New York art world to live in a remote blueberry farm in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, eschewing the hustle and bustle of VIP galas and the bluster of worldly success and acclaim. Thus, the Magician is not depicted with plaques, medals, or other trappings of worldly success - but is instead shown only with his artistic creations.  Isaac Witkin is depicted at the height of his creative powers, accompanied by his sculptural masterpieces including "The Firebird" (based upon the Stravinsky opera, now at the Smithsonian Institution), "Jantar Mantar" (Meyerhoff collection bequeathed to the National Gallery), "Waif's Anchors" (the Michener Art Museum) and other major steel and bronze works. There is also an African mask - a nod to his native South Africa and the African art and culture that inspired him throughout his life and career. Indeed, Thelma Appel's "Magician" is a homage to one of the most original sculptors of the 20th Century.  

Thelma Appel Biography

Thelma Appel is a renowned landscape painter who has been working and teaching for more than five decades. She 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.  Now in her 80s, her work is being re-discovered by a new generation of collectors and curators. Most recently, she was awarded "Most Expressive" by the Mattatuck Museum for her work in the invitational exhibition "The Art of Experience".  Another painting of Appel's,  "Exodus by Moonlight" (about refugees)  was included in an exhibition at the Brattleboro Museum in Vermont.  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, the University of Pennsylvania Fine Arts Gallery - and seen on the A & E Television Series "The Way Home."   In the 1980s, she was represented by the renowned Jill Kornblee Gallery on West 57th Street, and later Fischbach Gallery - (at the time the gallery of record for Alex Katz and other representational artist), and Appel's works were acquired by many private and public collections.  She is also a longtime art teacher, having taught drawing at Parsons School of Design, painting at Southern Vermont College and at the University of Connecticut.  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.

Appel became known primarily for her paint-soaked brush strokes on large canvases that sought to recreate the energy, color and immediacy of the landscapes.  In a recent documentary interview, the artist explained why she considers herself a Romantic landscape painter: "Not recording mimetically what lay before me, but trying to express the excitement I felt in response to nature by using paint-soaked brush strokes on a large canvas wherein the over-lapping layered strokes of color were metaphors for the contiguities found in nature. My early paintings sought to recreate the energy, color and immediacy of the landscapes...to convey a more raw "painterly" feeling within the image, rather than recording a particular scene or looking on from a distance. "

This print ships unframed, but for inspiration only is an image of the work framed when it debuted at the Art on Paper fair in New York City.