Decent session tonight on a painting of the chinese pavillion in prospect park. It is about thirty inches wide. The space is a relic from a different era. It is also interesting to see the landscape outside of the structure. Nothing but light and shadow will be inside. I am unhappy with the composition at the moment but believe I can make it sit better.
Parkside Avenue and Ocean Avenue
The Parkside Prize, a design competition for Parkside Avenue, is fast approaching a registration deadline. It’s exciting to see it reach this point, as I remember going to one of the first meetings back in the spring. Submissions have been coming in and we are planning to present them to the jury in January.
The Parkside Prize was the first neighborhood initiative I was involved in. I made the project website. I can’t wait to see the ideas that come in. Parkside Avenue was the first street in the neighborhood I encountered when I moved here last year. It is a vibrant place—plenty of opportunity and constraints. Fingers crossed a provocative, yet pragmatic design that can gather momentum.
Register! Design submission deadline is December 15th.
Don’t forget: There is just 2 days left to register for the contest to redesign Parkside Avenue.
We all know how shabby that block can be at its worst … how maddening it is to see all that concrete after a walk through Prospect Park, how sad it is to see all that crumbling plaster and peeling paint after arriving home on the Q. We all know how much better it could be, if the traffic were milder, if the sidewalks were cleaner, if the city cared for our block the way its cares for Columbus Circle, or Grand Army Plaza, or the Brooklyn waterfront. This is your chance to remake your neighborhood.
The deadline to register is December 1. The deadline to send in your design is December 15. The grand prize is $1000. All of the information you need is right here: www.theparksideprize.org
So! All you designers, all you architects. All you hackers and artists and freelancers. All you who ride the subway and think of old Walt Whitman. All you who, in your most private ambitions, see a city more open than Olmsted’s, more modern than Moses’s, more surreal than Julius Knipl’s …! Yes, you …! All of you …! This is your hour …! Do not delay …! One thousand dollars …! Register today …!
Our pop-up neighborhood show opening went great. We had a large turn out, with people coming from all over the neighborhood. Senator Adams gave a brief speech about how he would like to see more arts in the PLG neighborhood. Leslie and Daniel provided steel drum and guitar music while everybody looked around at the artwork from over 40 contributors. The mood was energetic and most people were astounded to see something like this going on—and sad to hear it will return to being vacant mid-november.
I was able to include many of my recent paintings. The surprise hit was the street corner,which I recently reworked. It was the most directly identifiable location. I love the chance to hang salon style, and this show provided that challenge. The bananas are a bit out of place, but so be it! I decided to hang them anyway.
Felix had a drawing of the “city in pink” hanging in the kids room. Students from several area schools were invited to participate. It was great to see them at the opening with their parents. They seemed very proud.
I was a bit out of it overall. I was fighting off a cold, which made traversing the social aspects of the opening a bit hard. My reaction time was slow. I was able to jump on the microphone for a little minute though! Did a quick verse on an acoustic cover of Marleys “I Don’t Wanna Wait in Vain For Your Love” It was fun to rock over steel drums for the first time! But Felix had me beat. He rocked the steel drums and danced and seemed to have a great time.
Overall, its been amazing to meet so many people in the neighborhood through this effort. The response has also been inspiring. Many folks have been walking in off the street with a smile on their face. I think the show has tightened community bonds a bit, and also illustrated a vibrant arts culture in the immediate area. It will be bittersweet when the pop up gallery closes, but the case has been made for such events in the neighborhood and I look forward to seeing what we can do next.
For now, I’m off to catch the music programming for this weekend at 552 flatbush, the Neighborhood show. Make sure to catch it by the closing party on November 13th.
A group art show celebrating PLG Artists and Performers.
October 30 – November 13, 2011
Prospect Lefferts Gardens Neighborhood Association (PLGNA) and PLG Arts present The Neighborhood Show: Equal parts gallery, arts & crafts market, and performing arts venue and 100% Brooklyn, for two weeks The Neighborhood Show will showcase artists living in Prospect Lefferts Gardens and surrounding Brooklyn communities with visual arts, music, spoken word, and crafts.
In a multi-ethnic neighborhood with residents from widely divergent cultural and economic backgrounds, the artist’s perspective allows us to take a new look at our selves and our neighbors and come together in celebration. Come celebrate with the residents of Prospect Lefferts Gardens and share in the work of nearly 100 resident visual artists, crafters musicians, and spoken word artists.
A group show featuring the work of more than three dozen local artists from the celebrated to the emerging whose work spans photography, portraiture, abstract, large-scale, nature scenes, and more: Otto Neals, Noel Hefele, Karl McIntosh, Joseph Bell-Bay, Lady McCrady, Georgia Redd, and dozens more.
Check here for a list of participating artists and a schedule of events.
Took away the Philadelphia and Totnes sections from the painting menu tab. I’ve moved the paintings over to the now renamed “ARTWORKS” section. I’m excited about the flexibility of the new archive system. I had tried a “smart navigation” plugin, but it wasn’t working correctly. It would be great if I could sort that out. It would allow for dynamically creating galleries and THEN being able to click the arrows to cycle through the paintings in that gallery. Could be really cool.
Tomorrow, I hope to remove the Pittsburgh section and consolidate the menu above.
Let me know if you have any thoughts about the revamp. I’m a hack at this wordpress stuff, so I am excited to get this working well (2 years after I initially switched to a portfolio based approach to wordpress).
Hi there. I am getting closer and closer to understanding wordpress in the way that I knew was possible. I’ve figured out how to keep the paintings separate from the blog, and treat them more intelligently than a simple one page gallery. The “Paintings” option on the main menu will soon be replaced with the “Sandbox” menu item. I have to make sure to move the paintings over to the new system.
I’m excited about it! noelhefele.com is maturing… stay tuned. Or, subscribe to my new mailing list.
Painted during a lovely afternoon by the lake.
Completed this one a few months back as a warm up for a painting of bananas. The drawing is in oil pastel, and is on a shoebox top. Colorful!
It measures about 8.5″ x 12″ – if interested – During the July 22nd – 29th, 2011, you can bid on it here
Davu Flint, Pittsburgh, now based in San Fran dropped Up the Down Staircase this May. Two tracks are produced by Hefstatic, aka, Noel 730N, aka Noel Damien Jonathan Kaiser Hefele, aka Me.
Check out the album here:
Happy to be on the album. Davu’s got flow and lyrics for days. Super listenable and the beats are nice!
Let me know what you think, and if you are in San Fran, look him up.
Each line was “the actual experience” of making the line.
Could Twombly be thought of as a Phenomenological painter?
I’ll admit, when I lived in Philadelphia, my least favorite room in the art museum there was the Cy Twombly room. It was hard to appreciate.
But nowadays, I almost view Twombly’s work as I view a tree. To see a tree is to feel it reaching for the sun light, encapsulating its growth in its very form.
I came across this Kandinsky quote recently:
…I see no essential difference between a line one calls ‘abstract’ and a fish. But rather an essential likeness. This isolated line and the isolated fish alike are living beings with forces peculiar to them, though latent. They are forces of expression for these beings and of expression on human beings, because each has an impressive ‘look’ which manifests itself by its expression. But the voice of these latent forces is faint and limited. It is the environment of the line and the fish that brings about a miracle: the latent forces awaken, the expression becomes radiant… …The environment is the composition. The composition is the organized sum of the interior functions (expressions) of every part of the work. (Paris, March 1935)
Kandinsky, from “Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries”, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 451
It seems like Twombly found a way to close the distance between the act of painting and his paintings themselves, without pretense.
This is incredibly difficult to do.
I will look for Twombly paintings here in NYC.
Pretty inspiring solutions to drawing the city landscape, by children at Felix’s school. They had an art show the other day, and it was impressive. The range of experiments on display was a testament to the teacher. The styles of drawing and the curious solutions proposed by children are always interesting.
Apologies for the blurry picture—it was an elementary school gym with less than ideal lighting conditions.
I find these nightscapes incredibly inspiration with my current immersion in the city. The children work in vertical or horizontal format. They stack the geometric shapes of the buildings with a logic that can only come from those who are growing up right inside of this place.
I think what is referred to as “artistic talent” is solely what is left in certain people when the rest have let go, buried or had it beaten out of them. ALL of the children seem to have artistic potential, but how many continue to develop it? Kudos to PS 249 for such a nice exhibition.
Desiretechnologysleepwithcomputer | 2011
Playing around with the computer program “Corel Draw.” I was reminded of this program by an old friend. I remember using it ten years ago. Hopefully I can bring it into my work flow for painting OR design work.
No need to try and photograph this well… as it emits light instead of reflecting it.
Painting by playing with predefined symbolic representations.
I’m delighted to be a part of a new group of painters, primarily based in the UK. We have recently established our group and are working toward producing our first exhibition.
From the site:
We are a group of artists who have come together to exhibit and celebrate the work of contemporary representational art.
We work on varying subject matters, from portraits to landscapes. Each work is based on capturing forms of reality, there maybe abstraction within the style and detail, but ultimately we all work as representational painters.
Take a look at some of the other painters…. it is an interesting bunch. I wonder if we are in the “non-representational” area of practice, a theory pioneered by Nigel Thrift. As I understand it, the process is the important part of the painting. The resulting painting is more an extension of the landscape or the painted object itself expressed through us. The diversity of styles and subject choice within the group seem to attest to this.
We push pigment, in collaboration with materials of the earth and immersed in the visible. Eventually, something resonates meaning back. We come to know what is around us through participation. Perhaps our paintings are the “fruiting body” of a sensuous engagement with world we live in.
A painting of the Bridge in Totnes while the river gently floods. This painting is currently hanging at the Fat Lemon Cafe in Totnes. 2 foot square.
[haiku url="http://www.noelhefele.com/wp-content/uploads/Gunlimited6-Instrumental.mp3" title="Gunlimited6 (Instrumental)"]
Old beat from about 2004! I’m loving the wobbly bass that I had no idea I would like back then. Done in fruity loops. Download it at http://www.noelhefele.com/wp-content/uploads/Gunlimited6-Instrumental.mp3
From the recent archives, I thought it would be good to post my dissertation from Dartington. Download the pdf of Landscape Perception and Inhabiting Vision.
The Abstract:
In this dissertation I investigate vision and landscape through painting. I identify landscape as a diverse and lively critical field of study as I have come to understand it through my reading. I recognise that a problem occurs between my painting practice and my understanding of landscape as a lived practice. Vision has a deeply rooted epistemology of detached observation and an ecological practice requires engagement. To continue painting landscapes, I must find a way to inhabit vision.
I begin by comparing landscape as a way of seeing (Cosgrove 1998) with a phenomenologically placed account of dwelling-in-the world (Ingold 2000). I explore how vision in a landscape operates in both accounts. Of the two models, dwelling presents a more ecologically engaging account of living within the landscape, but it seems to advocate more immersive bodily experience (i.e. movement, touch, smell or hearing) and has no place for a detached vision. Must vision always be constituted by detached observation? I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in order to come to an understanding of embodied vision. In doing so, my conceptualisation of practice and method has changed. I find a theoretical framework that will support future inquiries into living and painting as an inhabitant of my landscape.
I’ve moved the blog from the front page. I think having it on the front page was giving me writer’s block. So here is an informal aside.
fernhill release a new album, canu rhydd. I designed the album artwork for it. You can listen to / buy the album here. It is really lovely celtic folk music that blossoms with repeated listening. Christine Cooper, who plays the fiddle and voice on the album, was a classmate of mine at Dartington College this past year.
A banner I designed outside the main tent at the show
This past July, I had the honour of having my designs selected to be the public face of the last MA show at Dartington College of Arts, before its dubious “move” to University College Falmouth. I’ve included some examples here.
The MA students held a design competition to select the visual identity for Ultimate dART. My design was selected, even though some of my colleagues produced some impressive designs. I was aiming for something simple and bold, yet with an art feel to it. The design proved to be rather adaptable.
Initial Selected Logo Design
The poster based on the initial design
This was a tangential option for the logo. The color band and multiple text colors proved too busy.
Adaptation of the design I used for the cover of the show program.
Including the sound with the paintings was new for me. If landscape painting traditionally places the ‘subject’ as the audience or the painter, I think the sounds helped to create ‘subjects’ in the paintings… “Resounding Landscapes”
Click the images to enlarge. The audio for each painting is directly below.
[audio:http://noelhefele.com/audio/painting-sounds/10-plantation-7-16.mp3]
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[audio:http://noelhefele.com/audio/painting-sounds/11-hidden-house-7-16.mp3]
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[audio:http://noelhefele.com/audio/painting-sounds/9-farmhouse-7-16.mp3]
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[audio:http://noelhefele.com/audio/painting-sounds/8-ravine-7-17.mp3]
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[audio:http://noelhefele.com/audio/painting-sounds/redhill-quarry-7-17.mp3]
[singlepic id=82 w=320 h=240 float=none]
[audio:http://noelhefele.com/audio/painting-sounds/4-dart-7-19.mp3]
[singlepic id=79 w=320 h=240 float=none]
[audio:http://noelhefele.com/audio/painting-sounds/SWIMMINGPOOL-7-191.mp3]
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Forthcoming
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Forthcoming
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[audio:http://noelhefele.com/audio/painting-sounds/5-harvest-7-19.mp3]
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Forthcoming