Darren Jekel’s life can be summed up with five digit numbers: the zip codes of the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2013, he began painting this land he knows best- the chaparral and oak savanna, the rocky serpentine soil, the rolling hills brightly lit under Mediterranean blue. Jekel has let go of the ironic, cynical narrative of neo-expressionism and has replaced it with meta-modern earnestness. A survivor of the infamous ‘Valley Fire’, his home still standing after the blackened landscape cooled, he is now exploring the new life that has grown in its wake- living on many levels in a fire adapted landscape of rebirth. He's using charcoal while painting the rhyming lines of sinuous hills and sensuous figures. Darren Jekel's painting has an existential power and provides a new perspective on “mother” nature.
