Daniel Barber is a Los Angeles based artist and poet and his paintings and drawings have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Canada, and Italy. 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 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.

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 through philosophy before finally rejecting a lucrative job offer in television and quitting an early career in commercial design and deciding to be an artist.

While attending University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and studying with Martin Puryear, Dan Ramirez, Rodney Carswell, Phyllis Bramson, and other influential faculty, and after earning his MFA in painting, Daniel lived and worked as an artist for twenty years in a loft in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. Later, he moved to a 19th century farmhouse near Athens, Georgia, then an authentic log home in the woods near Providence, Rhode Island, and, most recently, relocated to Southern California where he lives and works on a modest ranch at the edge of Angeles National Forest. Daniel has taught as well, both studio 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, and art history—all serving as shaping influences upon his work. In addition to now working full time as a painter, he enjoys traveling, hiking, trail-running, and foraging for wild edible mushrooms, gardening, cooking, wine, swimming in the sea, and sharing his extraordinary life with his wife and family and their dog, Comet.