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.

"I love the messy brush that makes a neat stroke."- Jekel

"Art is the same as thing as science, except it's subjective"- Jekel

"The art is not mine, it just grew on the wall."- Jekel

“Good artists borrow and great artists steal”- Picasso. With bright light and California color I use 'heavy brush' sensuality to steal Wayne Thiebaud, who taught me how to paint. When I paint I feel like an alchemist searching for an unreachable prize- a paradise that I ache and pine for. But of course, there is no paradise. Facing that truth is where the focus of much of my work comes through, with pictures that are physical, modern, earnest, and unsentimental. I experiment with materials restlessly- recklessly? I stole Anselm Kiefer. The most astoundingly deep and existential thrill for me comes when I am finished painting and find that my art is not mine; it just grew on the wall.

When I paint figures in the landscape I am always interested in the commonalities and the contrasts that compare the female figure to the coastal hills where I live. Similarities between the two are how the lines rhyme in ways that are a sublime invitation to the imagination, and how the fire adapted, San Francisco Bay Area landscape of renewal compares naturally to a Mother Nature figure. Differences that I think about are how the fragility of flesh contrasts starkly next to rocky volcanic land and sun parched vegetation of twisted manzanita, ticks and poison oak. I also notice our ephemeral inevitability. She is poised next to the old-as-the-hills existential element of time.

My dancer paintings may collectively express our unconscious condition itself, and our vulnerable relationship to reality. The figure has it's own landscape when it is zoomed into with a grid to peer closer. I am always thinking about the searching draftsmanship of Raphael that I notice in his figure studies. I am always thinking about the repetative marks in Van Gogh's ink landscapes.

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