Meet Darren Jekel | Fine Artist Painter & Teacher

We had the good fortune of connecting with Darren Jekel and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Darren, what role has risk played in your life or career?
Art is all about risk taking. I think that every artist has an inner creator and an inner destroyer and that the two should be equally matched. It is like the two go together and can not exist with out the other. I think that with experience and very effective artists the creator and destroyer are expertly matched. To me risk taking is all about destroying comfortable well worn notions or assumptions and by being willing to destroy something in a painting. It is only then that something great can be born in its place. Actually, I try to destroy with every brush stroke. I try to destroy with every application of paint or enamel or emulsion, in a constant state of surrender, as an act of neo-expressionist process, even performance. I don’t mean to overly mystify my approach to painting (alchemy? lol!) but I definitely try not to fuss with things, or make them mine. It takes a cold detached vision to see things real. Monet could see ripples and reflections and lily flowers without any sense of sentimentality. Goethe could write without any sense of personality. I feel like I get no credit for my best paintings and it was like I just watched them grow on the wall.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
The outdoors is my deepest connection. It is my fertile ground. Nature spawns all my passionate hobbies and pursuits- plantsman/gardener, backpacker/mountaineer, and landscape painter. Recently I began including the female figure in the local landscapes that I was painting when I became interested in commonalities like the rhyming curves between the contours of the hills and the nude female form. I became interested in the contrasts between fragility and summer parched rockiness and the metaphor of mother nature. I became interested in the existential element of time.

When I was young and in college I had other plans as a scientist or something until I met Wayne Thiebaud at UC Davis and he taught me how to oil paint. Many of my Professors there were famous and art making became a legitimate thing to do. It was this omg commitment that led me next to backpack all over Europe for several months to study painting at the world’s greatest museums of Western Art History, really. A few years later I earned an MFA degree at the Maryland Institute, with a Mt. Royal scholarship, and when I returned to California, I settled in Sonoma County and got married. My landscape painting was a fresh blend of neo-expression and it won the overwhelming attention of Lisa Chadwick during a studio visit. She chose me for her grand-opening solo show at the famous Dolby/ Chadwick Gallery smack downtown in San Francisco… So, I’ve been painting like crazy the last three years in the north San Francisco Bay Area, California, reemerging after an interruption being a magical hobby farm father and making ends meet as an art teacher.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I would combine the well worn famous destinations like museums and famous beaches with exploring quiet backwaters and ethnic neighborhoods. It would be fun to discover new places with my friend that I did not know about without any expectations. Those are the best memories when discovering as explorers together.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I dedicate my Shoutout to the painter Wayne Thiebaud who taught me how to oil paint at UC Davis and showed me that the career of being an artist was a dignified and credible pursuit.

Website: www.darrenjekel.com

Instagram: @darrenjekel