biography

Darren Sears (b. 1977) is an artist-cartographer and designer originally from Cleveland, Ohio and based in San Francisco. From an early age he expressed a fascination with the physical and biological world through visual art; as a teenager and as a college student at Stanford, where he studied both the arts and the natural sciences, he was fortunate to visit many of the places that excited him. He was particularly captivated by Hawaii, the Galápagos Islands, and Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater with their distinctive, self-contained ecosystems and striking juxtapositions of wet and dry.

Expecting that a design career would allow him to accentuate these experiences of ecological uniqueness and contrast, Darren earned a Master in Landscape Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and entered private practice in Dallas, Boston, and then the Bay Area. The profession proved to be a good fit in many ways but not so much for this particular passion, so he began digitally combining travel photographs into photomontages capturing the ecological islands and edges that he could not heighten in the real world. Darren transitioned to oil paintings and ultimately watercolors using the same multifaceted approach (with a mixed media detour).

Since mid-2016 Darren has been taking a break from landscape architecture to focus on his watercolor works and related pursuits. He is represented by Hang Art Gallery in San Francisco where he has been part of duo and group exhibitions; other showcases include a solo exhibition at the Guren Art Gallery of the Cleveland Botanical Garden, the art collection of University Hospitals Ahuja Medical Center in Beachwood, Ohio, and juried group shows nationwide. In 2017 Darren participated in month-long artist residencies in Iceland and Tasmania. He also explores the theme of environmental islands and edges, and related ideas about ecological flux and fragility, through musical composition, journal articles, a blog, and regular talks at cartography and geography conferences domestic and international.