By
Noel Hefele
Piece description from the artist
This painting, to me, is about growth and death at the same time.
The subject matter of the painting is a sugar maple in Prospect Park. It is illuminated from behind, colored red during the height of autumn.
This painting is a tree at human scale. You are forced to confront it directly: growing, dying, and beautiful.
I kept my recently passed friend, Mag, in mind while painting this sugar maple. I started the piece when Mag became ill. I needed to jolt myself out of the stress and assert my own agency precisely because I felt so helpless. A 6 foot square painting was the perfect challenge.
Mag gave me a book called “Freddy the Leaf” after my mother died. It is about a leaf, transitions through life, and death. This book inspired me while painting this tree.
I also thought about the connection between the growth of a human and the growth of a tree…as well the way I orient myself to both. A human and a tree cannot change their roots. They are formed by the conditions they are born into.
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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