Maps of the World

The surreal, artistic cartography of Darren Sears

Darren Sears stands to the left of his framed work "Summit"

Sears with “Summit,” inspired by Maui’s Haleakala Crater | PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF Darren Sears and all paintings ©Darren Sears/HANG ART Gallery

Darren Sears, M.L.A. ’04, has always been obsessed with the edges of things: shorelines, tree lines, mountain peaks, desert oases—sharp contrasts where one landscape crashes into another and the natural world seems to crack open. “We typically think of nature as this big, incomprehensible, unmanageable thing,” he explains. But at the ecological edges, where the rainforest gives way to a beach or a snowy summit descends into evergreens, it suddenly becomes clearer how the pieces fit together. “That’s why I’ve always been attracted to these kinds of places out in the world,” he says.

And in art, too. Almost two decades ago, needing an outlet for his obsession and not quite finding it in his job as a landscape architect designing habitats for Caribbean and Latin American hotels, Sears began experimenting with photo collages of natural wildernesses. Soon, he was painting with oils, and then watercolors, creating massive kaleidoscopic works—some as large as five feet across—that fused fractured images of varying sizes, scales, and perspectives, combining aerial views with on-the-ground closeups of rocks and foliage. In one piece, Sears juxtaposes a stand of beech trees with the hollow cone of a spent volcano; in another, he splices a eucalyptus forest with ocean water and a rocky shore. Often, he chooses islands as subjects: all those well-defined edges and exquisite internal contrasts.

Abstract collage featuring overlapping landscape fragments of lush greenery, a coastline, and a black bird perched on a branch.
“Perched,” based on Lord Howe Island, Australia | ©Darren Sears/HANG ART Gallery

The works are strange and beautiful, both hyper-real and otherworldly—mosaics made from bits of controlled chaos. Sears hesitates to call them paintings, though, or even works of art; instead, he thinks of them as “artistic maps,” intended to capture the full expression of a place in a single composition. “I’m more focused on spatial experiences than scenic ones,” he says. His process for planning and executing each piece is as much mathematical as it is aesthetic. He finds a kind of omniscience in compressing broad swaths of terrain into “more and more absorbable scales,” accentuating the edges, distilling a landscape down to its elemental attributes.

It’s not hard to see how the same impulses that animate Sears’s watercolors once steered him toward landscape architecture. “I’ve had an interest in the environment and botany and natural phenomena for as long as I can remember,” he says. As a child growing up in the outer suburbs of Cleveland, he developed an abiding fascination with Japanese gardens. By the time he completed elementary school, he was designing rock gardens in his parents’ backyard. In college at Stanford, his interests were all over the place: ecology, geography, anthropology, linguistics, art history, studio art. He constructed a major that loosely combined all of them, and at the end of his junior year, he attended a summer program at the Graduate School of Design that pointed him toward a profession. Two years later, he returned to Harvard as a graduate student.

Sears photographs a palm tree
Sears photographs a cycad for research | PHOTOgrAPH COURTESY OF DARREN SEARS

After graduation, he worked in the United States and abroad, in both wilderness and urban landscapes. But he never quite found his niche, and after a few years of experimenting with collages, he decided in 2016 to devote himself fully to his painted maps, which have been shown across the country (he is represented by the San Francisco gallery Hang Art). Meanwhile, he has published several academic papers on his artwork in cartography journals.

Some of the places he paints are imagined, but most draw from his travels, beginning with family trips to the Southwest when he was a child. “I always wanted to do more hiking than was possible for us,” he recalls. In college, he spent a semester in Madagascar, studying ecology and conservation and backpacking through the countryside. Later, he spent several months in Peru, assembling a guidebook on Amazonian palms; in the years since, he’s traveled up and down the West Coast of South America and hiked through the Galápagos Islands and the Canary Islands. In 2017, Sears did two monthlong artist residencies, in Iceland and Flinders Island in Tasmania.

One recent watercolor, “Perched,” was inspired by a trip to Lord Howe Island off the coast of Australia, a tiny landmass teeming with lowland rainforests and misty mountain peaks. At its center, amid odd-angled shards of palm leaves, blue water, and green-carpeted mountains, sits a Lord Howe currawong, a black bird unique to the island, its face turned to the side, a yellow eye peering out warily. Sears contrasts “Perched” with “Mirador,” based on Robinson Crusoe Island, 400 miles off the coast of Chile. Untouched until 500 years ago, it has been devastated by fires, deforestation, invasive species, and livestock grazing. In his watercolor, it’s impossible to miss how the lush forests at the bottom (where a town sits tucked into the valley) sweep ominously upward toward a range of arid, exposed mountains. “There’s a shattered look to this one,” he says. “Like a broken window.”

Abstract collage featuring overlapping landscape fragments of an island
“Mirador” depicts a damaged island off Chile. | ©Darren Sears/HANG ART Gallery

Those two works hint at a darker undercurrent running through much of Sears’s work: the threat of environmental collapse and the effect of human intervention. Amid the energy and dynamism of his landscapes, there is also the feeling of something fragile and unstable. “These places have been changing, and they will always be changing,” he says. “And now, because of us, they are really changing.”

Lately, he’s been leaning into the thematic possibilities of that idea. A new series of watercolors explores the “urban-wild” contrasts in cities like Rio de Janeiro; Auckland, New Zealand; and San Francisco, where Sears lives. In “Peaks,” he depicts the hilltop park in San Francisco’s Twin Peaks neighborhood, a rare open space that retains the original shrub and grassland terrain of coastal California. Floating gauzily at the center, the park stands out against the staccato march of subdivisions. Sears has other pieces in the pipeline, inspired by similar juxtapositions: Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa; the Phlegraean Fields volcano outside Naples, Italy; Punchbowl Crater in Honolulu; and Lomas de Lúcumo, a lush mountainous park with ancient cave paintings in suburban Lima, Peru. “There’s always a question of, what do you mean by ‘nature’?” Sears says. “Because there’s no such thing as pristine places anymore—human impact is everywhere.” But so are the edges and contrasts: “All of this is evolving.”

abstract collage  featuring overlapping landscape fragments of an aerial hilltop park in San Francisco
“Peaks” shows a hilltop park in San Francisco. | ©Darren Sears/HANG ART Gallery

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