Darren Waterston

Waterson was born in California in 1965.{{cite web |url=https://darrenwaterston.com/about/ |title=About « Darren Waterston |publisher=}} He received his BFA at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1988.{{Cite web |url=https://www.otis.edu/alumni/darren-waterston |title= Autstanding Alumni Darren Waterston - Otis College of Art and Design |access-date=2024-04-29}} From 1986-87 he studied at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Germany and Kunstakademie Münster - Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Münster, Germany.{{cite web|url=http://www.dcmooregallery.com/artists/darren-waterston|title=Darren Waterston - Artists - DC Moore Gallery|website=www.dcmooregallery.com}}

In 2011, Waterston finished Forest Eater, which comprised approximately fifty paintings and works on paper and four site-specific sculptures. The largest of the sculptures is "Wrath", a forbidding eighteen-foot long vertical lava formation, which hung from the museum's ceiling. The project was conceived specifically for the Honolulu Contemporary Art Museum.{{cite web|url=http://honolulumuseum.org/art/exhibitions/11401-darren_waterston_forest_eater|title=Honolulu Museum of Art » Darren Waterston: Forest Eater|website=honolulumuseum.org}}

Filthy Lucre presents a dystopian version of The Peacock Room, James McNeill Whistler's 1876 decorative masterpiece.{{cite web|url=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-story-behind-the-peacock-rooms-princess-159271229/|title=The Story Behind the Peacock Room's Princess|first=Owen|last=Edwards|website=Smithsonian}} Waterston's work, like The Peacock Room, probes and considers the conflation of painting, architecture, patronage, and artistic ego. The project was conceived specifically for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and first exhibited in 2014.{{Cite web |url=http://www.massmoca.org/event_details.php?id=847 |title=MASS MoCA - Darren Waterston: Uncertain Beauty |access-date=2014-02-14 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140209071739/http://massmoca.org/event_details.php?id=847 |archive-date=2014-02-09 |url-status=dead }} In May 2015, it opened at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, while The Peacock Room of the adjoining Freer Gallery of Art undergoes renovation.{{cite news |last=Guducci |first=Marc |date=15 May 2015 |title=Darren Waterston's Filthy Lucre Is Whistler's Peacock Room on Acid |url=http://www.vogue.com/13261269/filthy-lucre-is-a-beautiful-nightmare/ |newspaper=New York Times |location=New York |access-date=10 February 2016}}

Of The Flowering: The Fourfold Sense, DeWitt Cheng wrote: "Darren Waterston’s older paintings were lyrical misty landscapes with silhouetted flora and fauna. His newer works, symbolist abstractions, become mindscapes in which ambiguous transparent forms arise, float, flutter, and sink amid mist, clouds, swirls, drips, and vermicular coils of brushstrokes; each image with its poetic cycles of life represents the cosmos as 'a divine chaos.'"{{Citation

| last =Cheng

| first =DeWitt

| title = The Flowering: The Fourfold Sense

| newspaper =art ltd.

| pages =

| date =March 2009

| url =http://images.dcmooregallery.com/www_dcmooregallery_com/SF_waterston.pdf}}

Sue Taylor wrote: "Adept at a myriad of fluid effects, Waterston is a virtuosic colorist as well, enlivening the palest mauve and power-blue fogs with passages of burning orange or hot pink. In these apocalyptic dreams, he imagines flashing, otherworldly realms at the brink of consciousness."{{Citation

| last =Taylor

| first =Sue

| title = Darren Waterson at the Hoffman Gallery

| newspaper =Art in America

| pages =205

| date =May 2008

| url =http://images.dcmooregallery.com/www_dcmooregallery_com/AinA_Review_May08.pdf}}

Of Waterston's exhibition Last Days, Regina Hackett, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer art critic, wrote: "If there's a more imitated painter in America than Darren Waterston, I can't imagine who it would be. Waterston's silky rot and colored goo are gorgeous. They imply a world in which the air has evolved to carry a weightless and more sophisticated kind of consciousness. Working in oils on panel, Waterston creates worlds inside the world, what Gerald Manley Hopkins' described in God's Grandeur: 'Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.'

In the current exhibit, titled Last Days, Waterston merges beauty with blight. He paints starlight inside a cave, roots in the air, and minerals dissolving into liquids. 'Fallen' features a hollowed-out and free-floating tree trunk. White orchids with stale, shadowed edges hang suspended under fragments of enameled blue sky."{{Citation

| last =Hackett

| first =Regina

| title = Never fear, painting is here: 'The Prom' and 'Last Days' crank up the wow factor

| newspaper =Seattle Post

| pages =

| date =January 17, 2008

| url =http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/visualart/347746_visual18.html}}

• Baas, Jacquelynn et al. Darren Waterston: Representing the Invisible. Milan: Edizioni Charta, {{ISBN|978-88-8158-624-0}}
• Baas, Jacquelynn. Material, Immaterial: Waterston's Ghosts, New York: Charles Cowles Gallery
• Burton, Tim and Carmine Iannaccone. Darren Waterston: Paintings. Los Angeles: Kohn Turner Gallery, 2000
• Clothier, Peter. In the Reeds and the Rushes, Fresno, CA: The Fresno Art Museum, 1999
• Cross, Susan et al. Darren Waterston: Filthy Lucre. New York, Skira Rizzoli, 2014
• Doty, Mark and Darren Waterston. A Swarm, A Flock, A Host: A Compendium of Creatures. New York: Prestel, 2013, {{ISBN|978-3-7913-4757-8}}
• Gamblin, Noriko. Darren Waterston. New York: Charles Cowles Gallery, 1997
• Gamblin, Noriko. Elegies, Long Beach, CA: Long Beach Museum of Art, 1992
• Khalip, Jacques. Darren Waterston: Split the Lark. New York, DC Moore Gallery, 2014
• Kimball, Cathy. Was and Is Not and Is to Come, San Jose, CA: San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, 2007
• Pagel, David. Hyle. Paris: Galerie Jean-Luc and Takako Richard, 2006
• Robinson, James et al. Darren Waterston's Filthy Lucre: Whistler's Peacock Room Reimagined. London, V&A Publishing, 2020
• Voorhies, James. Darren Waterston: Remote Futures. New York: DC Moore Gallery, 2012
• Waterston, Darren and Tyrus Miller. The Flowering (The Fourfold Sense). Portland, OR: Lewis & Clark College, 2007
• Weissman, Benjamin, and Amy Gerstler, Darren Waterston, Los Angeles: St. Ann's Press, 2001

{{reflist}}

• {{cite news

| last =Kuspit

| first =Donald

| title = Darren Waterston

| newspaper =Artforum

| pages =209

| date =January 2013

| url =http://images.dcmooregallery.com/www_dcmooregallery_com/AF113p209.pdf}}

• {{cite news

| last = Croisier

| first = Ellen

| title = Darren Waterston's "Remote Futures" at DC Moore Gallery

| newspaper =untapped

| date =October 10, 2012

| url =http://untappedcities.com/newyork/2012/10/10/darren-waterstons-remote-futures-at-dc-moore-gallery/#}}

• {{Cite book

| last = Voorhies

| first = James

| title = Calling Beauty

| place = Columbus, Ohio

| publisher = Columbus College of Art and Design

| year = 2010

| isbn = 978-0-9797476-5-6

| url= http://bureauforopenculture.org/images-pub/catalog-CB-web.pdf}}

• [http://inmangallery.com/artists/waterston_darren/bio.html Darren Waterston – Inman Gallery]
• [https://www.darrenwaterston.com/ www.darrenwaterston.com – official Website]

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Category:1965 births

Category:American installation artists

Category:Living people

Category:20th-century American painters

Category:American male painters

Category:21st-century American painters

Category:21st-century American male artists

Category:Otis College of Art and Design alumni

Category:Painters from California

Category:American contemporary painters

Category:20th-century American male artists