Biography

Daniel Graham was born in Monterey, California in 1946 to Judith Deim and Ellwood Graham, both well known artists. He was raised and educated in artists’ colonies in the United States and Mexico until 1960 when the family sailed to Europe on a cargo boat from New Orleans.

His early education included apprenticeships with an indigenous weaver in Mexico; with a knife engraver in Toledo, Spain; and with a mosaic ceramicist. At age 16 went to live with the family of the Marquis de Baroncelli in the Camargue, France, where he worked with the wild horses and bulls for two years.

At age 18 he went to Andalucia, Spain where he worked with the gypsies buying and selling horses and where he began to love the art of flamenco. His brother Benje studied flamenco guitar and his sister Juli became a flamenco dancer. At age 21 he moved to Paris and enrolled in the Beaux Art School of Fine Arts where he studied drawing and painting for two years.

He then moved back to Andalucia, where he painted landscapes and enjoyed the high level of flamenco art there until 1968 when he moved to Antwerp, Belgium and enrolled in the local art school to continue studying painting. In 1970 he journeyed to Morocco where the streets and market places served as subject matter for his semi-abstract, figurative paintings.

In 1974 he moved back to the United States, bought a piece of property in Northern California where he built a house, and started a family. He spent the late seventies and eighties living between Mexico and Northern California devoting his creative energies to painting and video production.

From the nineties to the present he has concentrated solely on large reliefs and three-dimensional sculpture.