Featured Artist Daniel Edlen

Featured artist Daniel Edlen creates fascinating portraits on vinyl, celebrating both music and art.

What are your goals?

My main driving goal is to be an artist, in the broader sense of being true to myself in everything I do. As a new father, a huge part of this is supporting my family, again in the broader sense. In the practical sense, I want to financially support us by selling my artwork.

This thought hadn’t even come to mind until a couple years ago after having sold my Vinyl Art on the side for awhile. My portraits on vinyl had become a great way for people to show they cared about the music lovers in their lives, something physical in this digital world, custom created art showing thought and remembrance. It gives me great satisfaction when someone who chooses my art as a gift for someone tells me how fun it was to give, and then the recipient also tells me how great it felt to get the piece. I seek to provide that tangible object for people to hold onto and share, to help them celebrate culture and creativity in a personal way.

What are you working on now?

To that end, I’m working on Vinyl Art, my first go at creating art on the artifacts of creativity. I handpaint portraits of musicians and entertainers on classic vinyl LPs using straight white acrylic. I have a video to demonstrate the technique. I work both on commission and consignment, as well as participating in group and solo shows. VH1 headquarters in NYNY recently showed 24 pieces in their corporate gallery and AR4T in Laguna Beach, CA has 4 pieces in a group show this month.

I also push to give, finding charities like Ear Candy and VH1 Save The Music to donate pieces for auctions. Earlier this year I painted around 20 pieces to donate to the David Lynch Foundation’s new charity music label benefitting their cause to bring Transcendental Meditation to the youth and PTSD patients. I have a page that shows most of the pieces along with a video about it. That was wonderful because I got to give to a neat cause and say thank you to some incredible musicians for their work.

What inspires you?

The music of some of those musicians is part of what inspires me, the creativity of others. To be a part of this Universe as a human is quite amazing. To be able to create art is fabulous. I’d love to help everyone realise they can be an artist. It’s just a question of discovering your art. I have a tumblog called Thankful: for to which I post videos and pictures and words from past creativity by others that inspired me, that went into making me who I am today. Getting to give back to our culture inspires me no end. No end.