Derek grew up in Los Osos, California, where he explored the estuary, bluffs, beaches, and dunes of the Estero Coast, becoming fascinated by the animals and plants there. He spent childhood summers camping across the states with his family on the way to New England and back.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in art from UC Santa Cruz in 2008. Derek has lived up and down the Pacific coast from Washington to Southern California, eventually returning to reside in his hometown of Los Osos, where he works as a naturalist and outdoor youth educator. As often as possible he travels both abroad and within the Western United States, seeking inspiration and broader perspective for his bioregional expressions.
Statement
Since 2012, Derek has been developing a graphic style informed by various primitive arts and revivals of primitive arts. Beginning as a means of expressing spiritual kinship with animals and gradually evolving into its current form, his art is focused on depicting animal and plant life of the California central coast bioregion.
His visual influences include a diversity of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, or non-Western cultural schools: flat painting of the Santa Fe Indian School style, Woodland art of the school of Norval Morrisseau, Chumash pictographs of the California coast ranges, California tribal basket weaving, South Pacific tatau art, Japanese mon emblems and notan design work, Scandinavian and Celtic designs and runes, Greek and Russian Orthodox icon painting, Islamic geometric design, and worldwide prehistoric pictographs and petroglyphs.
The goal of Derek’s bioregional neoprimitive art is to see the land with a healthier vision than that offered by current imperialist-capitalist culture. It depicts animals and plants as vibrant spiritual beings the equals of humans, and highlights the ecological relationships in the web of life which surrounds these beings. His work is informed by both scientific and spiritual-mythological perspectives. It is his philosophy that by cultivating respectful and loving relationships with the native animals and plants we may begin to heal our culture and grow a future of rooted connection with the land and all of its inhabitants. This vision explicitly includes support for radical social justice for BIPOC worldwide, and land back and food sovereignty initiatives for all Indigenous peoples.