Daniel Aldana is an early career artist living in Southern California. He has had a lifelong love of art and like many artists, spent his childhood drawing. After high school he attended a small liberal arts college and majored in art. His primary interest was art history and figure drawing. Unlike many artists, he then decided to go to medical school.
He attended Yale School of Medicine (1989-1993), which gave him ready access to a large Art school where he took classes between his medical studies, and to New York City with its art collections.
He began to paint during his internship, the first year of a three-year specialty training in pediatrics, and would paint when he had a chance (despite work weeks that sometimes stretched more than 100 hours).
After specializing in pediatrics at Loma Linda Children’s Hospital, he taught hospital management of children and evaluation and management of child abuse victims. His academic and patient-care activities left little time for painting, and when he married and had his first child, he found that the time with his family was also getting squeezed.
With the support of his wife he began a plan to leave his practice of medicine and become a full time artist. In the spring of 2005, he took a plein air painting class and became enamored with the challenges and opportunities of painting outside and realized that it afforded a setting to grow as a painter. That summer he began to paint full time.
Since that time Daniel has become a Signature Member of Laguna Plein Air Painters, received numerous awards and has become one of the leading plein air painters in the region. Daniel is one of the permanent artists on display throughout the year at Roger’s Gardens Fine Art Gallery.
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