Mount of Olives Painting

This unique, signed, titled and dated acrylic and oil on canvas painting was exhibited in the Fall of 2018 at the show, "Thelma Appel: Landscapes, Cityscapes & Biblical Journeys", Edward & Bernice Wenger Center for the Arts, Greenvale, New York, curated by art advisor and director Susan Seelig. Mount of Olives is a mountain ridge east of and adjacent to Jerusalem's Old City. It is named for the olive groves that once covered its slopes - a place that has great meaning and significance to many religions. Thelma Appel is a representational and abstract painter who has been working and teaching for more than five decades. She was born in Israel, 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 Mattatuck Museum, the Bennington Museum, the Berkshire Museum, the Children's Museum of the Arts, 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 it was featured in 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. She has also taught drawing at Parsons School of Design and 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 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. In 2019-2020, Thelma Appel was the subject of a career survey at the Brattleboro Museum of Art, curated by Mara Williams who has curated shows by Emily Mason, Red Grooms, Wolf Kahn and many other renowned artists.