Jekel loves the messy brush that makes a neat stroke. An American artist living in the San Francisco bay area, he was tutored how to work a canvas by Wayne Thiebaud in the eighties, at twenty. Oil is Darren’s preferred medium and he often mixes it up with a kitchen blender, using eggs and other mixtures to make a mayonnaise-like medium that he calls ‘emulsion’. His paintings are hugely energetic and have a brutal quality similar to the ‘neo-expressionism’ of Anselm Kiefer. Originally his paintings were abstract. They soon switched to beautiful landscapes with uncomfortable horizons and narratives of longing for paradise maybe. Currently dancing females have emerged center stage and his painting appears to be moving beyond ‘post-modernism’ to a place less cynical and ironic.
