Trained by Wayne Thiebaud, Darren Jekel’s paintings have Mediterranean colors and creamy brush sensuality. Influenced by Anselm Kiefer in graduate school, Jekel’s paintings also have an alchemical toughness and a shocking matter-of-fact quality like they just grew on the wall. A lifelong resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, he paints the chaparral and oak savanna that he knows, the rocky serpentine soil and the rolling hills brightly lit under vivid blue skies. Recently, Jekel is letting go of the ironic, cynical narrative of post-modernism and is replacing it with meta-modern earnestness. Survivor of a terrible wildfire, his home miraculously standing after a blackened landscape cooled, he is now exploring the new life that has grown in its wake. Living 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.