There is not a time when I can remember not drawing. As a kid, drawing was a way to make sense of a sometimes difficult world. My dad had passed away in a car accident when I was 9 months old, leaving my single 19 year old mother to do her best in those early years to support my older brother and I. We were low income and bounced around a lot while mom sometimes worked 2 jobs , grandparents, family, babysitters. Life was turbulent. Even as a small child drawing was the thing I found that felt consistent, a thing that could be improved upon and controlled, a place of peace to retreat, but also the thing that inspired me and made we want to charge forward into the world. Creating felt natural, stable, magic...

My mom remarried when I was 6 and we moved to the country where I took to exploring woods and fields and streams and found a love of nature. Nature was the best place for a wild kid like myself, a counter to book learning that I was finding increasing difficult. In elementary school I was diagnosed as dyslexic. I did not process letters and numbers and memory the same as most kids, but my creative skills were overdeveloped. I learned to read pictures and illustrations when words failed me. I was not a great student, likely due to that difference in learning, but my artistic skill would earn me a scholarship and admission to art school. At the Columbus College of Art & Design I learned the craft of making art and earned a BFA in Illustration. While there, my literature professor noticed my dyslexia in assignments and explained to me that a large number of my fellow artists, throughout history, are dyslexic or share some form of learning “uniqueness”. This made me realize we all have gifts and deficits and that is beautiful in it’s own way.

Today, I live with my amazing wife and two sons in rural Ohio and have had the great honor of being a stay at home dad while working as a freelance artist. I work a lot in the wildlife art genre because the natural world is a subject of endless curiosity and inspiration for me. I have had the great pleasure of having some of my artwork used to generate funding for wildlife habitat conservation across the country. I have had my work land in the collections of art lovers. I have helped small businesses develop branding that propelled their companies forward. It is humbling when a person connects with work that I have poured a bit of my soul into.

Human creativity is a gift we all have, and I hope everyone finds an outlet for their own creativity. I have felt blessed by artistic creativity at times and wrestled terribly with it at other times, nevertheless forging it into a career I love. Thank you for visiting this page and spending a moment with my artwork. If you have any questions or would like to personally inquire about a commission or owning one of my works, please contact me.

Thank you,

Daniel Allard