Darren Waterston

Darren Waterston's somber but sexy paintings layer curvy, organic forms over strong colors in alluring riffs on the language of landscape. As abstract works with a visceral physicality, they evoke a sense of place without geographic reference. Their night-sky blues, mist grays and blood reds are dotted with disorienting arrays of starry pinpoints, bubbles, ripples and rays. Perhaps because his work could offer a window to anywhere--deep space, your backyard, or your synapses--it works at any scale. His most recent mural project, Was and Is Not and Is to Come, for the San Jose Contemporary Art Center, was his largest to date, expanding over 150 feet and taking two weeks to execute. Waterston has exhibited internationally, is included in permanent collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the de Young Museum, and has been covered in ArtNews, Art in America, GQ,, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.

Darren Waterson's early paintings were interpretations of conventional landscape imagery, depicted as meditations on fertility and decomposition. Examples of the early work appear in this book, but the majority of the paintings are from a more recent period where he shifts the focus of the work away from decaying abstraction into one of exoticism, decadence and an underlying erotic sensuality. Waterson uses traditional painting materials and techniques, and the multiple layers of paint that are the foundation for his works infuse them with a wet, atmospheric quality. He also has an acute interest in the aesthetics of the East, and motifs of the Orient punctuate every picture. The paintings that at first appear quite ethereal and whimsical upon further investigation reveal a sensuality combining a poetic language of flora and fauna with an overt observation about the human body and other creatures. The result is a complex layering of opposing forces: beautiful and unsettling, appealing and revealing, extroverted and introspective.