Thelma
Appel
The second generation of Abstract Expressionists veered away from the fast and aggressive mark in favor of a slow-blooming sense of movement and the impression of an expansive and enveloping depth. By the mid-1960s Color Field painting was in its heyday, and painter Thelma Appel had arrived in Vermont, following a childhood and art education that had taken her from her birthplace of Israel all over the world. Appel identified with the idea of creating, via expressive surface treatment, a sense of environment and expanse, but she did not feel the need to break with pictorial depiction in order to achieve it. Inspired by the new setting that surrounded her, she spent her time in Vermont creating a unique body of landscapes that emphasized the feeling of the place and her reaction to it. She states that her paintings of this era “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.” With the move to New York City in 1977, Appel returned to the more familiar cityscape but retained in her work a manner of representation heavy with feeling, texture, and vitality.
