Daniel Ignacio

My goal is to document: my life, my ideas, what I feel, what I’m experiencing in that moment. To freeze a point in time in my life like photographs. To make social commentaries. To rant, in a creative way. To escape and transport myself to worlds, anywhere but here.

In terms of art style, Theo Prins, a concept artist, is my earliest and still my biggest creative influence since 2014, not just his cityscapes but the way he portrays a world through intricate texture and softness of colour. In the old masters, I’m influenced by Rembrandt and Bruegel the Younger and how they tell stories and evoke emotions. In the same way, I am influenced by the authors C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Haruki Murakami, Sylvia Plath, and Virginia Woolf.

I lived in the Philippines for thirteen years and I grew up there immersed in the Southeast Asian culture and environment. Now that I live in Canada, that sense of nostalgia has influenced my early cityscape artworks, especially the ones that feature marketplaces and shantytowns found in my earlier works (e.g. “Walls to Tear Down”, “The Great Sonder”).

I have two always on-going series: Fine Daydreams and Abstract Cityscapes. Fine Daydreams feature fantasy landscapes while Abstract Cityscapes feature vibrant cities. Aside from these two series, I just finished a special art series called Fine Nightmares in October 2020 as tribute to #spooktober or the Halloween season in which I created highly gothic, supernatural horror-inspired artworks. These pieces can be found on my lnstagram and Artstation galleries. Another art series I’m working on is called “The Forgotten Gods” – a very unique series that’s different from my other ones, featuring obscure gods from ancient literature and history. It’s more of an abstract character design with a gothic, dark academia influence.

I am a musician. I play the keys, the guitar, and a little bit of the drums. I nerd about jazz, watching music theories on YouTube. I also love reading poem anthologies where I also draw inspiration from.