Throughout her childhood, Apple practices painting in such environments, but she never receives any formal training. This primarily due to Laurence’s rational that schools ruin artist and only result in a need to unlearn the prescribed conventions. Apple’s artistic training is based on more hands-on and experiential approach. Through her liberal upbringing and artistically enriched environment, she fully develops her creativity and practices her craft freely.

While raising children, Apple continues to pursue her artistic ambitions and begins painting ceramic tile. These early works constitute the beginning of her serious endeavors as an artist. She exhibits her painted tiles in several Miami galleries: the 24 Collection, Grove House, The Peanut Gallery, Gloria Luria, and Miami Dade Community College. In 1977 she receives a commission through Art in Public Places to do two tile murals, (8’x6’ and 8‘x20’) in the Dade County Woman’s Center.

It is through working on this mural that Apple discovers a new genre of painting that would be sustained for the rest of her career. It would involve series of paintings used in narrative form.

Text would be combined with image and they would evolve together, resulting in a continuous epic story of one’s self-discovery. The entirety of her works includes nearly 300 deeply meaningful paintings and takes her roughly seven years of daily immersion into meditative state to complete. For that period of time, Apple takes residence in the modest room at the back of the house, essentially isolating herself from the world and gets surges of inspiration that she expresses in paintings.

In 1985 Apple Vail, along with Mabou Mines and the composer Richard Isen, receives an inter-disciplinary arts grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. A theater piece based on the paintings and text of Apple Vail, is conceived and directed by Frederick Neumann and performed in December of same year. She now turns solely to writing and devotes the remainder of life to it.

In the year preceding her death, Apple Vaile publishes four short stories in The American Voice (Editor Frederick Smock) and carries on working on her prose version of Starcock until she is diagnosed with cancer and is not able to continue.

She has left behind rich body of work in the series  of 296 concsiousness transforming paintings called “The Birth Of Starcock”. Apple’s daughter, Emilie Goeser is inspired to introduce her Mother’s vast collection of works to a wider audience and is making exclusive selection available for sale. 

Apple Vail is born in 1929 in Paris of American parents who are active participants of the intellectual and artistic life in Europe in the 20’s and 30’s. Her father is Laurence Vail, writer and artist, previously married to Peggy Guggenheim, with whom he had two children. Apple grows up in this household in which she is exposed to great artists and art. Her mother, Kay Boyle, an eminent and well-known American writer, who also fosters creativity within the home environment. Kay would often read poetry and play various types of music and would have the children paint their impressions.

At 19 years old, Apple Vail marries an American friend of the family, photographer Joseph Goeser, who is studying at the Institute des Hautes Etudes Cinematagraphique. She continues to live in Paris, painting and creating jewelry to sell at small boutiques while her husband studies and looks for work. After exhausting their resources and struggling to find decent work, the couple decides to move in 1958 to America  where prospects look brighter. They settle in Miami, Florida, begin a family and spend remainder of their lives there, raising three children and creating great works of art.

Apple Vail dies in 1988 at fifty seven years old after battle with cancer.

(1929-1988)

Creative Life

Personal Life