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 begin visiting many of the places that excited him. He was particularly captivated by 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 engage and accentuate these spatial experiences of ecological isolation and contrast, Darren earned a Master in Landscape Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and entered private practice. The profession proved to be a good fit in many ways but not so much for this particular passion, so on the side he began creating photomontages that evolved into oil paintings and ultimately his watercolor maps (with a mixed media detour). So far, these maps have been inspired by his travels in about a dozen countries across six continents.

Since mid-2016 Darren has been taking a break from landscape architecture (whether permanent or not remains to be seen) to focus on his watercolors and related pursuits, and he is represented by Hang Art Gallery in San Francisco. He has exhibited his work locally and nationally, including as part of the permanent collection of University Hospitals Ahuja Medical Center in Beachwood, OH, and has done artist residencies in Iceland and Tasmania. He also explores the themes of his maps through musical composition, articles, a blog, and regular talks at cartography and geography conferences.  He has recently begun a Substack and a YouTube channel.