By
Noel Hefele
Piece description from the artist
The brownstones in my neighborhood are beautiful. I'm fascinated by the interactions between the street trees and the buildings themselves. The trees dapple the light while the architecture structures it.
7000 Oaks is one my favorite pieces by Joseph Beuys, and I feel like the relationship between street trees and the brownstones they stand in front of echoes some of the aspects of that work. The trees grow, as they do, and mark the passage of time for those that dwell within and maintain the houses. The trees are clocks and records for those that live near them.
I frequently walk these blocks with the 311 app on my phone. I look for empty spaces in the sidewalks where I can click through to request a new street tree.
When we choose to live with trees, they can become the platform for intergenerational dialogue. I paint them as a way to think through these magnificent organisms and our relationship to them.
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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