By
Noel Hefele
Piece description from the artist
Three things were in mind when approaching this painting:
1. The implementation of depth in recent work. I'm drawn to creating an exaggerated feeling of depth. A friend was looking at some of my paintings and asked, "What if you toy with that expectation?" In this painting it is almost as if the trees are placed arbitrarily in front of the scene. Is it a composite? are the trees growing in water? or are they lining the bank of the body of water?
2. Around the same time, I had a painting survive a fire. Another friend was looking at that painting (a red overgrown car), and said "Wow it's like the trees in your painting were in a forest fire and didn't get burned! They are survivors!" I thought this was a nice metaphor. The fire is in the foreground, but in the distance the trees are still green.
3. In Japanese the kanji for forest is 森, which comprised of three trees. All it takes is three trees to communicate a forest. This lead me to learn that there is no universally recognized definition of a forest. More than 800 definitions are used around the world. What is a forest for you? — Our languages sort our impressions of what constitutes a community and what constitutes an individual.
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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