Daniel Barber is a Los Angeles based artist and poet and his paintings and drawings have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in North America and Europe. He was born in Erie, Pennsylvania and moved annually as a child about the eastern and midwestern United States and traveled frequently, usually camping, all over the United States and Canada. He is an autodidact, insatiably curious about many fields of knowledge. Such explorations led eventually to his embrace of his innate passions for science and art. Stress-induced hallucinations, familial anxiety, and synaesthesia experienced for decades helped fuel his interest in meditation—which he practices daily—and the nature of perception, and contributed to his openness to visual thinking, complementarity, and complexity.

Daniel spent seven years in radio beginning when he was fourteen managing his high school radio station (prompted, in part, by building a stereo from scratch when he was ten years old and constructing a computer in high school) while working as night manager of an Amoco service station to earn money for college. His undergraduate studies were grounded in physics and forged on through philosophy and media communications until, after graduation, he rejected a lucrative job offer at NBC television and soon after left a burgeoning career in commercial design and decided to be an artist. Such is fate, or something like it. An uneasiness with how things seemed to be compelled an effort to see things as they are and explore that awareness through art.

While attending University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and studying with Martin Puryear, Dan Ramirez, Rodney Carswell, Phyllis Bramson, and other influential faculty, Daniel was honored to be granted a solo MFA exhibition at UIC Gallery 400 and, after earning his MFA in painting, Daniel lived and worked as an artist for twenty years in an expansive loft in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. Later, after the birth of their first child, he and his wife moved to a 19th century farmhouse near Athens, Georgia, both of them teaching there and in Cortona, Italy. Nearly a decade later, they moved to an authentic log home in the woods near Providence, Rhode Island, and, many DIY renovations later, in 2018, relocated to Southern California where he now lives and works on a modest ranch at the edge of Angeles National Forest.

Beyond his studio work, Daniel taught both art and art history at the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago, Emory University, the University of Georgia, and other institutions. Such work provided opportunities to travel throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia, teaching painting and drawing, and lecturing on art history and theory.

Daniel’s interests range through many disciplines—astrophysics and neurobiology, psychology and philosophy, Buddhism, poetry, art history, and the chemistry and physics of paint—particularly the viscous goo of oils—and other materials and how it engages with attendant human perception—all serving as shaping influences on his work. In addition to now working full time as an artist, he enjoys traveling, hiking, trail-running, and foraging for wild edible mushrooms; gardening, cooking, wine, swimming in the sea, and sharing this one unique life with his wife, family, and friends and with his dog and studio companion, Comet.