Darren Sears
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(214) 505-1583
I am represented by Hang Art (www.hangart.com) in Union Square and Fort Mason, San Francisco—please contact them ([email protected]/415-434-4264) for prices/sales, or to schedule a visit.
I experience nature spatially rather than scenically—as maps of contrasting landscapes linked into multi-faceted "worlds" rather than as one snapshot at a time. An individual landscape means little to me unless I can journey to where it ends and beyond, just as knowledge of darkness defines light. In watercolor, oil, and mixed media, inspired by travel and imagination, I sharpen contrasts and edges to organize nature into small, comprehensible slices that are distinct yet inseparable.
Growing up in Ohio and restless for the unfamiliar, I developed an early fascination with exotic plants and landforms. Beginning in my teenage years I was fortunate to visit many of the places I had been fantasizing about, and was especially captivated by Hawaii, the Galápagos Islands, and Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater with their volcanic landforms and striking juxtapositions of wet and dry. It became clear that I am most drawn to places characterized by dramatically sharp boundaries and contrasts—small islands, isolated mountains, oases, steep rainfall gradients, tiny cinder cones, wilderness relicts encircled by development—especially when they represent down-scaled versions of entities typically thought of as overwhelming in scale or force (like entire continents and massive volcanoes). I wish I could compress and humanize these places even further into miniature worlds that are fully explorable and “knowable,” giving me an exhilarating feeling of empowerment.
I experimented with digitally cropping and combining travel photographs to create photomontages that invent or enhance the places that entrance me; the compositions are fragmented as if multiple perspectives are being compressed into a single view (or "worldview," the term I would later use). From there I moved to oil and then watercolor working in the same fractured style, continuing to use photographic references to varying extents (so far from about fifteen countries on six continents) and incorporating aerial perspectives based on satellite imagery. These experiential maps represent wider geographies—fuller, multi-dimensional experiences of a place—than could be captured by any single scene or a purely bird’s-eye view. (I did take a detour from this approach in a series of mostly mixed media works where bird’s-eye views are more prominent, although 2D or 3D topographical representations in plexiglass give the depicted locales an additional degree of multi-dimensionality. In some of them the incorporation of pathways and boardwalks heightens the sense of accessibility and humanization.)
Though the places that inspire the "worldviews" are idealized to varying degrees, they also express my distress at the fragility of those real places. Climate change, invasive species and other environmental threats are particularly devastating to the very locales that I am drawn to—tiny natural relicts and the complex ecological zonation patterns of islands and mountains. They also convey the reality that conservation requires an appreciation of how ecosystems and landscapes fit into their wider environmental contexts. My yearning to gain a firmer psychological grasp on the natural world has come to include a strong protective impulse.
