Born on November 24, 1929 in New York City to French immigrant parents, Jean-Paul Darriau graduated from New York's High School of Music and Art. He pursued his undergraduate studies at Brooklyn College and later earned his Master of Fine Arts at the University of Minnesota in 1954, studying under the master sculptor Harold Tovish. During this time, he also married Cherry Grace Merritt.

Before settling at Indiana University for the bulk of his artistic career, Darriau taught at Oberlin College in Ohio and, as a graduate student, at the Minnesota Institute for the Blind. According to his obituary, the latter was an early expression of his life-long belief in the possibility for and redemptive power of human communication, dialogue, and peace. His 1996 career retrospective exhibit at the IU Museum of Fine Arts served as a professional capstone of that belief, expressed in its title "Traditions and Transgression - Forty Five Years of Sculptural Conservation." In 1961, he began teaching at IU and was Associate Professor of Sculpture at IU's School of Fine Arts for thirty-five years, until his retirement in 1996.

Darriau received two Fulbright grants, which allowed him to study in Italy and France. In Italy, he spent two years working in bronze casting techniques at the Istituto d'Arte in Florence and the Guastini Foundry in Pistoria, from which he emerged a master of bronze casting.

During his career, his work was presented nationally and internationally at museums such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Joseph Hirshhorn Collection in Washington D.C., the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Denver Art Museum, and the Galleria Schneider in Rome. Several of those repositories, including the Indiana University Art Museum, possess Darriau's work.

Darriau's work remains on display in Bloomington. His 1980 sculpture, "Red, Blond, Black, and Olive," consisting of two 11-ton slabs of limestone carved with faces, depict the racial diversity in Bloomington, resides on the city's Northside in Miller-Showers Park. "The Space Between: Adam and Eve," a bronze piece, is located at the edge of Dunn Woods just behind Kirkwood Hall on the IU campus.

Darriau passed away on August 19, 2006