By
Noel Hefele
Piece description from the artist
Prospect Park in Brooklyn is a gem. It is different everyday.
Teardrop Island, with it's single tree, is almost crafted to be like a painting itself. The island used to be overcome with phragmites, invasive weeds that can clog out native ecosystems. The other side of the small island is covered with a black tarp, to suppress the remaining root growth. I sometimes refer to this painting as "The Thin Line Between Above and Below Ground." The painting is a meditation on how appearances of nature can hide a struggle; the peaceful serenity of being in a landscape and the ongoing tension between nature and culture hidden beneath the surface are two sides of the the same coin. Surrounding a tree and it's reflection in the water, somewhere between the growth above and the roots below, we locate and make sense of our own experience.
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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