By
Noel Hefele
Piece description from the artist
Cleft Ridge Arch in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. This is the first concrete arch built in the US and the last of the five arches built in Prospect Park. Due to a recession, they needed to save money and utilized the new béton-Coignet technique of molded, re-enforced concrete. The architects, Olmsted and Vaux, intended the arches in the park to act as portals—transitions between different landscapes of the park. Built in 1871, the contrast provided by the arch between the bright sunny landscape and the dark tunnel would produce a visual effect that was quite impressive at the time. It is almost a precursor to the television, framing the landscape that you then emerge into.
I wanted to paint this scene with an element of how I experience it daily. I first came to learn about it when walking our dog in the park every morning. The arch has been the scene of many eras of NYC culture: at one point folks in top hats and fancy dresses would regularly walk under it, and now it seems city residents frequently walk with their dogs.
The day I painted it was just after a spring rainstorm, adding some delightful light challenges along the floor of the arch.
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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