By
Noel Hefele
Piece description from the artist
This American Elm is stunning in all seasons. I painted it in early spring. I was trying to capture a sense of an enormous tree enveloping the viewer from above. This painting is on a relatively smaller canvas.
American Elms used to be numerous in the American landscape, before Dutch Elm disease decimated the populations. Dutch Elm disease is a fungus that reportedly came over with a shipment of lumber from Europe. It is fatal for an American Elm, usually killing the tree in a single season. The first documented case in the United States was in 1930. One estimate states that 77 million American Elms died by 1970. This is a staggering figure, changing our notion of the American landscape forever.
This tree in Prospect Park is a relic of sorts, likely to become an increasingly rare site in the future. This summer, in 2017, I spoke with some park rangers who were inoculating a few elm trees as a protective measure. Dutch Elm disease had killed several trees in the southern area of the park. Let's hope their efforts at containment are successful.
Noel Hefele is a talented landscape painter with a diverse background in the arts. Born and raised in Norwalk, Connecticut, he received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002 and later earned a MA in Arts and Ecology from a school in England. Throughout his career, Noel has had the opportunity to exhibit his work internationally and has pieces in numerous private collections. He has also served on the board of the non-profit community arts organization PLGarts in Brooklyn, New York and co-teaches a graduate course at Brooklyn College called Human Tracks in the Urban Landscape. In 2013 and 2014, Noel was the Artist in Residence at the Barbuda Archeological Research center in the Caribbean.
Currently, Noel resides and works in the Bronx, New York where he is in the process of exploring Van Cortlandt Park and creating a new body of work. As an artist, Noel believes in the power of art to help us move towards a more responsible and holistic understanding of the environment. He sees the landscape as an entangled field of relationships that includes humans, animals, plants, minerals, and more, and believes that by viewing the non-human world as more than just objects, we can take responsibility for our impact on the planet and recognize that we are not the sole subjects of the Earth's narrative. Through his art, Noel aims to collaborate with the landscape in order to produce effects in himself and others, aesthetically and emotionally reconfiguring the way we see the world.
For more information and to see more of Noel's work, visit www.facebook.com/NoelHefeleStudios.
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