Original artwork description:

I enjoy the loose uninhibited quality of drawing with a simple yellow Ticonderoga pencil on a smallish peice of paper. This feels as free as a sketchbook to me. The pencil I have always known and it feels so natural in my hand. In this work I am particularly interested in exploring the mark making similar to Van Gogh's landscape drawings in ink. Well, ... I explore a lot of other stuff too.

This is a study and practice drawing for an oil painting composition in my 'Odalisque series'. In this body of work I am 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.

Master of Visual Art Degree - MFA, Maryland Institute, Mt. Royal School of Painting.
Bachelor Arts Degree – BA, University of California, Davis

Primary Influences: Wayne Thiebaud, who taught me how to oil paint at UC Davis; Renaissance; Raphael drawings; Post-Impressionists, Matisse &; Van Gogh; Abstract Expressionists, Willem de Kooning & Cy Twombly; Neo-Expressionist, Anselm Kiefer; Currently I am not relating to Post-Modernism’s irony and I am exploring Meta-modern earnestness. I am interested in meaningfulness and not the ubiquitous decorative painting that is primarily meant to enhance the space it’s in.

Darren Jekel is married and fathers two daughters in northern California’s wine growing region.

Materials used:

Pencil

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