- Date Of Death: August 17, 2015
- State: Alabama
Ms. Ethel Meisels, age 95 of Baker, Florida passed away Monday, August 17, 2015 at her caregiver’s residence in Andalusia. She was accompanied by her daughter, Vickey Tiel and close friends.
Ethel Kipnes was born in Hudson NY, the Hudson that has become today one of the hangouts of the New York City arts community. Her father owned Hudson’s only soda pop factory, producing creme soda and root beer in pale green bottles with Kipnes Bottling Hudson in giant relief across the top.
Ethel lived on Fairview Avenue in a house on a hill overlooking the picturesque mountain town. She had big dreams to become a fashion designer in NewYork. Her mother sewed most of her dresses and Ethel bought all the fashion magazines in the thirties and learned to sketch and eventually sew her own dresses. World War 11 put and end to her fashion dreams and she moved to Washington to work as a secretary for the war department.
There, she met and fell in love with a handsome Russian, David Tiel. He was a man with his own dream to become an architect and a builder of homes in the Maryland suburbs. They married, had a daughter, Vicky and divorced when ultra-conservative, David discovered his wife had a secret passion for expensive shoes.
Very slim, a chic beauty and always fashionable, Ethel had no trouble finding husband number two, a top government official. Together they moved with teenage Vicky, to leafy Chevy Chase, Maryland, where Ethel had the perfect fifties housewife-life of Country clubs, Cadillacs, and backyard pools. Ethel could not play the housewife for very long. After a few months, she signed up for fine art school at American University, and after graduating in 1956, began a 55 year career of painting in oil and sketching in pen and ink, in large notebooks as she traveled the world with her international tax man, Milton Meisels.
In 1975 Ethel Kipnes had a one woman’s art show in the Avanti Gallery in Georgetown, Washington DC. The sellout success was enough for Ethel to continue to believe in her gifts and to continue oil painting. Her paintings were mostly figures, often on very large canvas, and yet she never had another show, as her paintings were her “babies”. She could not part with a single one.
In Normandy, in the seventies and the eighties, Ethel was inspired by Monet, Matisse and Bonnard and her canvases changed with their new broad strokes and more vibrant colors that were inspired by the French Fauve movement. Her previous darker oil paintings of the nineteen fifties had evolved into the bright earthen tones by the eighties as she grew in confidence and happiness from her years in France, close to the homes of her idols.
She had her first art show at 92 in 2012 at LAAC in Andalusia, Al. and was a member of the National Association of Womens Artists showing 4 times in NY at Po Kim gallery on Layfayette St. and Nawa on Fifth Ave.
