darren sears | worldviews

I’m excited to announce that I’ve started a Substack! And, a series of YouTube videos that will run more-or-less in parallel. In general both will be taking over from this blog, though when Substack updates deal with new work, I’ll post those on here as well.

Part of the plan, on both platforms, is to revisit the material I’ve posted on here over the years, looking at it from some fresh perspectives for a broader audience. But there’ll be plenty of new thinking and new work too, to some extent picking up where I left off on themes that this blog has introduced.

My most recently completed watercolor map, Headland, is my latest on the theme of urban-nature contrasts. This one is inspired by Lion’s Head, a dramatic granite outcrop and surrounding park in the middle of Cape Town, South Africa. It’s a small piece of Table Mountain National Park, disconnected from the rest. The National Park overall protects an island of fynbos, a shrubland/grassland ecosystem typical of South Africa’s zone of Mediterranean climate. It represents a Biodiversity Hotspot, globally rare and unique not only because little of its natural extents remain but also because those extents have always been limited: it makes up the Cape Floristic Province, by far the world’s smallest such region (there are only six in total).