I grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and I have been drawing for as long as I can remember. One of my older sisters Kelly Darke is also an artist, so she has always encouraged my artwork and has been a great influence. I was also lucky because the Grosse Pointe public school system had a lot of motivated and gifted art teachers that taught me a lot. So throughout my time in elementary school, junior high school, and high school I took as many art classes as I could, and I entered a lot of scholastic art competitions and various poster competitions (and I won awards which motivated me to continue to draw and paint).

I then went on to Western Michigan University (I was tempted to go to an all art school, but due to Kelly's experience with an art school in New York and due to wanting a full range of courses (and the cost of art school!) I decided to go to a public university in Michigan that had a strong art department). I was juried into Western's fine arts program, and I focused on watercolor painting--primarily training under Lou Rizzolo, who is an internationally renowned art teacher and a great mentor. During this time I was in several group shows, including a group show at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama as part of the International Workshops. Kelly and I also maintained an online art gallery that showcased fifteen international artists. I also illustrated for a poetry magazine called The Dirty Word (interesting name) and I illustrated for the Detroit Institute of Arts' first rare book exhibition. My experience at Western culminated with a successful solo art show at Western's Rotunda Gallery.

More importantly, I started dating my future wife after my first year at Western. She is an amazing person who motivated me to really push myself (my grades improved a lot). During my last year at Western I knew that I was not that interested in getting a Masters in art, and one of my older brothers, Sean, was considering law school (fyi, I am the youngest of five). My father is an attorney and I always had a tremendous respect for my father and lawyers in general, so I also applied to law school. I ended up going to Michigan State University College of Law, and I loved learning the law. My brother joined me at Michigan State. I immersed myself in learning the law, working for several public and private legal institutions and obtaining an Intellectual Property and Communications Law concentration and a certificate from the Trial Practice Institute. All in all, I had a great time. I then went on to practice law in Detroit, and now I am practicing in Boston (and I am working toward a Masters in Law in Banking and Financial Law). I got married a year after law school, the same week my wife graduated from Medical School. My sister and I drew or painted hundreds of flowers, each flower was mounted on a 6" X 6" board, and were given away as wedding gifts (each table was named after a certain flower).

I still draw and paint, but I rarely show my work to anyone besides family and friends.

My sister and I are currently maintaining a blog at kellydarke.blogspot.com/, where we critique each other's work, push each other to paint more, and post images or websites that we find inspiring. We somewhat recently decided to continue with the 6" X 6" format and explore certain formats and aesthetics, and eventually show our work at various venues. So far, we have received a lot of positive feedback about our work and have a target to start showing a selected group of the work in July of 2008. Until then, we are going to sell very limited edition prints (only 10 of any given piece).

Thanks for visiting, and let me know what you think!