Darren Young has an M.F.A. in painting from Indiana University. 

Growing up on the countryside, the artist had always been attracted to a more rural landscape. During his first teaching job was at the University of Colorado, he did a great amount of traveling throughout the southwest and Yellowstone National Park. The scenery he encountered there inspired a sense of awe and led him to create a series of landscape paintings based on the forest fires that affected that region.

Today, Young teaches at Wingate University in the Charlotte area. Since returning to this specific part of the US, the artist’s landscape paintings have become increasingly imaginative and painterly, with a great focus on textural qualities that express the beauty of his immediate surroundings.

His creative process is rooted in a spiritual understanding of the landscape that harkens back to the writers and artists that were influenced by Transcendentalism, such as Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, George Inness, John LaFarge, and Worthington Whittredge. 

With strong, simple compositions, an intense use of colour, and stark contrasts, the artist evokes a sense of light and space. Focusing on the expressive qualities that are imbued by different kinds of brush strokes, Young aims to create a powerful sense of atmosphere on the canvas. Including both figurative imagery as well as abstract elements, his creative process is unpredictable, even for the artist himself.

Darren Young currently lives and works in North Carolina, USA.