Location: Oakland / West Marin, CA
Medium: Painting, mixed media
Website: soleedarrell.com
Soleé Darrell was born in 1989 in Bermuda and moved to California more than a decade ago, eventually settling in West Marin while maintaining a studio in Oakland. She is largely self-taught; before turning to painting full-time she worked as a silversmith and jewelry designer, and it was during the pandemic in 2020 that she began painting daily as a creative and emotional outlet. She has exhibited across the Bay Area, in Bermuda, and in Tokyo.
Darrell’s career accelerated rapidly after she began working on silk velvet. In 2022 she mounted a solo exhibition at Legion Projects in Healdsburg. The following year she undertook a residency and solo show at Almost Perfect in Tokyo, deepening her exploration of spiritual and meditative themes through mandala-influenced forms. In 2024 she was selected for the Museum of the African Diaspora’s (MoAD) Emerging Artists Programme in San Francisco—her first museum solo—and simultaneously participated in the 2024 Bermuda Biennial at the Bermuda National Gallery. In 2026, her first solo show in Bermuda, Offerings, opened at the Bermuda National Gallery, and a survey exhibition, Pure Passage, was presented at the Bolinas Museum.
Darrell works intuitively with powdered and liquid dye on silk velvet, a process she developed independently while attempting to capture the layered, luminous quality of her own dreams. Her method involves dampening unstretched velvet and pouring or hand-applying pure pigment directly onto the wet surface, often within a strict 30-minute window before the dye sets. She also employs ice-dyeing, in which melting ice draws the pigment across the fabric in organic, cellular patterns. The resulting paintings—large-scale saturated abstractions in jewel tones and celestial hues—evoke distant galaxies, coral formations, and inner emotional landscapes simultaneously.
Her influences include mid-century Abstract Expressionists, particularly Helen Frankenthaler, and the mystical abstraction of Hilma af Klint. Recurring themes across her bodies of work include spiritual transformation, ancestral memory, healing, and the porous boundary between the physical and intuitive worlds. Titles such as Mind of Divinity, Blessed are they who remember, and Meet me in utopia signal her interest in language as a portal—inviting viewers to locate themselves inside the work rather than simply look at it. She often paints outdoors, immersed in the natural landscapes of West Marin, where the light and the land enter the work as direct participants.
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