CT ARTIST explores topics of common experience

PRESS RELEASE FOR UPCOMING SOLO ART EXHIBITION
WORKS BY THELMA APPEL

Thelma Appel IMAGES OF DANGER and HOPE
FIVE POINTS ANNEX gallery
17 Water Street
Torrington, CT 06790

June 8 through July 5, 2021

THELMA APPEL is both a representational and abstract artist. Her work ins included in many major corporate, institutional and private collections such as the Vermont State Legislature, the Milwaukee Art Institute, the New York Police Academy Museum, the Brattleboro and Bennington Museums of Vermont, the Mattatuck Museum, Connecticut, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Chase Manhattan and Prudential Collections, New York, NY and the Federal Reserve, Boston, MA, among others.

In October 2019 she was honored with a 50 year career survey at the Brattleboro Museum: Thelma Appel Observed/Abstract.

Throughout her career Thelma Appel had depicted scenes that resonated with her personal experiences, celebrating nature, during her many years as a landscape painter, scenes of destruction and displacement of populations in wars, and later, the 9-11 attack. These disturbing images were followed by a joyful, cathartic series of fabric collages depicting imaginary or actual places: the City of Dreams series.

After a major life juncture, her representational style underwent a transformation: She undertook the ambitious project of painting 22 narrative symbolic canvases based on the Major Arcana (mysteries) of the Tarot. These images depict a metaphorical journey through life from birth to death: Some of these paintings were displayed at Wisdom House in Litchfield CT in the Milestones exhibition, 2017. There is a progression of creative thought here following the narratives of the Tarot paintings: for human beings the journey of life is linear, but the artist wanted to explore a more fluid concept of time.

A series of abstract paintings followed in which time has no beginning and no end: Time is expressed in painterly terms of gesture, color, form and emotion like an endless cosmic dance. In human memories time is cyclical: Recalling the period she had lived in New York City. Appel used Times Square as a metaphor for this awareness in a series of 13 large iconic mixed media paintings, several of which exhort the viewer to "live for now", "make your mark"; "don't look back" and other such seemingly philosophical words excerpted from their original advertising context. The intent is to provoke the viewer to engage in an internal dialogue. These paintings were exhibited at New York City's Port Authority Project Find space on 42nd Street by the Chashama Foundation in 2020 and 2021.

Life has changed since the Corona virus pandemic. In the exhibition at the Five Points Annex, the images of danger show environmental degradation resulting from climate change, toxic wastes and detritus, with their effects on nature and wildlife. The exhibition alludes to increasingly destructive storms, wild fires and the havoc caused by the COVID19 pandemic. Yet there is hope in nature's renewal, human compassion, and the dawn of a new day.