Hello, I'm Darren Jekel.

Darren Jekel is an American contemporary artist based in the northern San Francisco Bay Area. He specializes in expanding the boundaries of oil painting technique. Using a kitchen blender to mix a mayonnaise-like medium that he calls ‘emulsion’, he draws on top of wet oil paint with soft vine charcoal to make dark black lines which become an important element in his compositions. To play with light on his surfaces, he uses unconventional mediums as metallic aluminum enamel, polyurethane, and shellac. As a multidisciplinary artist, Jekel also uses gouache painted over intense acrylic hues, exploring by copying the techniques of Van Gogh’s ink drawn landscapes and Rafael’s brown ink and chalk portraits. Occasionally he dabbles in printing and the fine textures of drypoint etching. Jekel is best known for his large-scaled, sunny-day interpretations of Anselm Kiefer’s tragically brooding paintings (Kiefer’s instruction influenced Jekel’s master’s thesis at the Mount Royal School of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art). Jekel’s work is executed with expressive and sensual brush strokes which approach the technique of another master painter (Wayne Thiebaud taught him how to paint at the University of California, Davis). Jekel creates stunningly layered canvases while working to combine the impulse of an abstract expressionist with the acute draftsmanship of a Renaissance master. His canvases are unselfconscious; he claims he does not even paint them, merely watches them grow: “the most astoundingly deep and existential thrill for me comes when I recognize that I have finished a painting and find that my art is not mine; it just grew on the wall”. Jekel’s work explores contradictions. Landscapes have storm clouds with clear bright blue, undulating curves next to ruler drawn straightness, ‘blah’ grey clashing with intense color. His canvases provoke the viewer to notice how curvilinear hillsides visually rhyme with the contours of the female form. Using a generous amount of materials and drawing starkly straight lines across the painting, he creates a bold, visually flattened surface – while at the same time tempting the viewer’s imagination with contrasting illusions of a deep horizon. While humor is easily found in Jekel’s work, most central to his themes are feelings of sadness and longing for an unattainable paradise, the impossibility of ever returning home and innocence. Within these existential reflections, a great love for nature – and inspiration from its beauty – is evident. Jekel’s work has been showcased in notable exhibitions, including Recent Works by Darren Jekel at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery’s first show in San Francisco. His pieces are part of prominent collections, such as those held by Adobe Inc. (San Jose, USA), Roth and Associates (San Francisco, USA), and Atelier Architecture and Space Planning (Campbell, USA). Additionally, Jekel has participated in numerous group shows such as Emerging Perspectives of California Artists at Finegood Art Gallery (Los Angeles) and the Studio Bus Tour at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.