Thelma Appel

Thelma Appel is a popular 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.