Artist Statement
I paint landscapes. Cézanne claimed that “the landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness,” suggesting a temporary merging of subject and object. A painting then becomes more of a collaboration than a representation of the landscape; it does not claim to speak for it.
I paint landscapes that I inhabit and explore as a process of inquiry, never as an authority advocating for nature from a position of expertise. Sometimes people share personal experiences of places I paint, adding depth and richness to my understanding of the landscape.
We collectively produce our landscapes as a community, both physically and mentally. Painting can be one small contribution to a community’s understanding of itself.
My hope for my own work is that painting and exhibiting landscapes I live in can foster a sense of connectedness within a whole, enhance a sense of place and intimacy, and call to attention a larger web of relations that we live in and among.
We live here together and I have painted you.
Parts of this statement first appeared in The Nature of Cities (2014) and Voices of Lefferts (2021).
Artist Bio
Noel Hefele is a landscape painter based in the Bronx, New York. He received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and his MA in Arts and Ecology from Dartington College of Arts in England. He was an Artist in Residence at the Barbuda Archaeological Research Center in 2013 and 2014.
Between 2000 and 2006 he worked with Collins & Goto Studio (Tim Collins and Reiko Goto) in Pittsburgh, as web developer for 3 Rivers 2nd Nature — a STUDIO for Creative Inquiry project at Carnegie Mellon studying the post-industrial edges of the city’s three rivers. It was there he first encountered the practice of daylighting a buried stream — a practice he is now painting as New York returns Tibbetts Brook to the surface.
His work is held in private collections internationally. He has exhibited widely throughout his career, with a focus on the ecology and landscape of the Bronx and Hudson Valley. He is a 2021 City Artist Corps grantee and serves as a volunteer coordinator at Van Cortlandt Park.
Press
- The Riverdale Press, July 2026 · “Wetland Wednesdays target invasive water chestnuts in Van Cortlandt Park”
- Pioneer Works, October 2024 · Emily Raboteau, “Daylighting a Brook in the Bronx”
- Inside Climate News, June 2024 · “New York’s Chronically Underfunded Parks Department Is Losing the Fight Against Invasive Species, Disrepair and Climate Change”
- The Bronx Buzz, BronxNet, March 2024 · on the Daylighting Tibbetts series (video)
- Norwood News, July 2023 · “Volunteers Clean VCP Pond as ‘Daylighting’ of Tibbetts Brook Advances”
- Voices of Lefferts, Winter 2021 · featured artist, “Landscapes”
- The Nature of Cities, November 2014 · essay, “How can art be a better catalyst for urban nature?”
- Londonist, May 2012 · review of Repre at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London
- Sierra Club, 2006 · quoted on Pittsburgh’s sewer overflows in Building Better II (PDF, p. 18)
Interested in commissioning a custom painting? Learn more about commissions here.