Daron Fraley grew up in Cody, Wyoming, where the light is hard and the horizons are wide. Good training for a painter. He works in acrylics and oils, chasing contrasts and complements rather than any single favorite color. [Sounds like AI, doesn’t it?]
We’ll break into that nonsense with my own take on where I am in my art journey. “Chasing complements” is at least what I am trying to do. In 2025 I joined Tisch Academy to hone those skills because the painting bug definitely bit me hard this time, after 35 years of being mostly away from it. I’ll just give my plug for Tisch Academy right now: It’s the best online training I have ever had, in any field or subject. You want to get better at painting or drawing? Go check it out. Andrew and his team are phenomenally talented, eager to help, and definitely not “numbkies”. (Not sure if I spelled that right, Andrew.) If you decide to join the Academy yourself, tell them I sent you. No, seriously . . . when you sign up using the link above, definitely tell them I sent you with a coupon “DARON” for 30% off. My personal yearly membership fee will appreciate it.
As for that favorite color question: “I don’t have one, I never have. I love contrasts and complements — I could never pick just one.”
Back to the AI generated slop:
[Others have called him a Renaissance man, which surprised him at first . . . he would deflect the label, but his heroes wear it well: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Washington, Jefferson, Adams. Men who refused to be only one thing. Daron is a writer, a painter, a technologist, a Solutions Architect, and a developer. He has finished three basements from framing to paint, grows gardens, prunes grape vines, raises chickens, creates recipes, makes from-scratch jams, and once built a solar food dehydrator from some parts he already had on hand coupled with a short trip to Home Depot for the remaining items. He has done that kind of thing at least five dozen times. He also once fixed a gas clothes dryer using photocopier parts, and it worked.
He will tell you without hesitation that his greatest skill is lunch. “Favorite food” eludes him the same way a favorite color does. He gravitates toward combinations of the most versatile: butter, lemon, and whatever he pulled out of a clear Wyoming or Utah stream. Those three things together bring a trout dinner almost to the top of the list. Almost.
His scriptures look like a warehouse full of children got loose with erasable plastic crayons and archival markers, which tells you most of what you need to know about what drives him. He lived in France, loves Switzerland and Italy, and travels purposefully, phone camera out, reference photos accumulating, the next painting already forming somewhere in the back of his mind.]
Okay, that’s enough of that. I left those three AI-generated paragraphs in here because they ARE true. And I was too lazy to transpose them into first person.
I have always been a creative, and I appreciate that side of myself. But this has caused me some mental struggle ever since I was a kid because I have interest in so many things and my biggest enemy is TIME. I took every science and math class (but one) that my High School offered, and excelled at them. I also wanted to be a Chaplain in the Military, and I did try going down that path, but it didn’t work out.
So when I ended up in Information Technology, I needed a creative outlet to balance the other side of my brain: I decided to act on a goal I set in Creative Writing class all those years ago, and I wrote a novel. And then a bunch of short stories. And a novella and a novelette. Yeah, we won’t get into the technical definitions of what those are. But go check them out on my Books page. That writing journey is forever a part of me, even though my attentions have pulled me elsewhere for over a decade. One of the factors which distanced me from my writing was admittedly on account of the publisher which produced my first novel going out of business and the legal struggle to get my rights back, but I digress . . .
To all of my readers who complain about the preview chapter at the end of my first novel, THE THORN, which hints at a second novel which still has not been completed, I do sincerely apologize. Just pretend that preview chapter never happened, and the book still works as a stand-alone, I promise.
As you can see, I’m a bit distracted. Did I mention that I am now officially and app developer? See . . . too many interests, too little time. But even though it is a daily struggle to balance my time and interests, all will be okay as long as I get these relationships right (and I am trying!):
Christ and Family.
Jennifer and I have six children and seventeen-and-a-half grandchildren, and I love them dearly. I am eternally grateful for all of them.
One final word: As you look at the Gallery, you will see quite a variation in quality. I started with acrylics in January, 2021, and moved to oils in the summer of 2023. YouTube artists showcasing techniques, a “Colors” class with Layne Johnson, then joining Tisch Academy, and putting in a lot of brush miles . . . have made me more confident in my work over the last couple years. I hope you like them.
Thanks for taking a moment to hear me out. May the Lord bless you and yours.
Follow my work on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fraleyatelier