Daniel Stara (b. 2000, Florida) is an emerging painter who makes paintings about being watched. His surreal, impressionistic landscapes fuse classical imagery with post-apocalyptic unease, turning visibility, control and concealment into quietly unsettling images. One original oil is available now at Art of NOMA: For My Next Trick (2025, 116 × 175 cm, USD 4,400).
Who Is Daniel Stara and What Does He Paint?
Stara, born in 2000 in Florida, paints landscapes that are not quite landscapes. Across large-scale oils and limited editions — Age of Surveillance, Over The Bridge, Eclipsed Village — he holds a bold contemporary surface against a current of psychological unease. Digital surveillance and generational disillusionment run through the work, handled as atmosphere rather than illustration. The question the paintings keep asking is what it means to be seen in a world that never stops looking.
The distinction matters, because subject matter this topical usually arrives as protest imagery: cameras, screens, slogans. Stara does none of that. There is no lens in the frame and no figure caught in the act of watching. Instead the sense of being observed is carried by structure — by horizons that recede further than they should, by light that seems to come from no fixed source, by compositions that leave the viewer positioned slightly outside the scene rather than inside it. The unease is spatial before it is thematic, which is why the paintings hold up on a wall long after the topic has stopped being new.
The originals are oil on canvas, built through layered colour fields and controlled gesture so that tension emerges without spectacle. Each is a unique work, mounted on a professional wooden frame and ready to hang, with a certificate of authenticity. That restraint is a technical decision as much as an aesthetic one: layered oil holds colour transitions that a flatter, faster medium would collapse, and the slow build is what gives the surfaces their sense of accumulated atmosphere rather than applied effect.
For My Next Trick and the Pause Before Revelation
For My Next Trick (2025, 116 × 175 cm / 45.7 × 68.9 in, USD 4,400) is the original oil currently available, and it is the largest statement of that idea in the collection. The title marks an interval — the charged pause before revelation, when expectation has built and certainty is withheld — and the painting stays inside that pause rather than resolving it.
Worked in oil on canvas, it accumulates through slow transitions and restrained colour, so meaning is suggested rather than declared. The broad horizontal format moves the eye laterally across the surface: a narrative held in suspension. It arrives mounted on a professional wooden frame, ready to hang, with a certificate of authenticity.
Horizontal formats do specific work. A tall canvas asks to be confronted; a wide one asks to be read, left to right, the way a landscape or a film still is read. Stara uses that reading time against the viewer. There is no payoff at the end of the pan — the composition delivers you back to where you started, still waiting. Because the upper layers sit thinly over the colour fields beneath, the surface reads differently under changing light rather than settling into one fixed image.
How Surveillance Turns Into a Painted Landscape
Age of Surveillance is the work the gallery names first when describing Stara, and it exists in two distinct forms. The original is a unique oil on canvas from 2025, 150 × 150 cm, in which visibility itself becomes the subject — exposure, control and the weight of constant observation, treated as atmosphere rather than a literal scene. The square format casts the viewer as both watcher and watched, the symmetry suggesting containment while the surface refuses to resolve. That original painting is not currently available and is named here for context.
The square is the sharpest formal decision in the body of work. A square has no implied direction — no horizon to travel along, no vertical to climb — so the eye returns to the centre and stays there. That enforced stillness is the point: the composition does to the viewer what the subject describes. It is a rare instance of a painting's format carrying its argument rather than merely housing it.
The same image also exists as a separate signed limited-edition print (55 × 55 cm, USD 125) — a different object from the painting, worth distinguishing so the two are never confused. Prints and originals occupy different places in a collection: the print is an accessible entry into an artist's imagery, the painting is a unique object with its own surface history. Neither substitutes for the other.
Where Stara Sits Among Contemporary Painters Working With Unease
Stara is not alone in treating anxiety as a landscape rather than a portrait, and seeing the work alongside its neighbours sharpens what is particular about it. Paranoid Android by Daniel de Polignac reaches for the same territory from the opposite direction — where Stara empties the frame of figures, de Polignac pushes a presence right to the front of it, and the discomfort is immediate rather than ambient. Cells and Animals, from the same hand, works through density and pattern where Stara works through space.
Aurora Kalos offers a third route. Contemplation and Awakening hold an inward, quieted mood that reads as the private counterpart to Stara's public one — the interior state rather than the observed exterior. Collectors building around a mood rather than a medium often end up with pairings like these, and they hang well together precisely because the tone is shared while the strategy is not. Grouping by feeling, rather than by style or price bracket, tends to produce collections that stay coherent as they grow.
Scale, Format and Living With the Work
Stara works large, and the scale is part of the argument. At 116 × 175 cm, For My Next Trick is a wall-scale painting meant to be read across rather than taken in at once; it suits a long wall with real viewing distance in front of it. Age of Surveillance, at 150 × 150 cm, presses the same point through symmetry. A painting about being observed behaves differently when it is big enough to observe you back.
Practically, a 175 cm-wide canvas wants roughly three metres of clear wall and enough room to step back three or four metres. Under-hung or crowded, the lateral reading the painting depends on simply does not happen. Worth measuring the wall before falling for the image.
Collecting Daniel Stara — Prices and Availability
Art of NOMA publishes a price on every work, so nothing is quoted on request and no enquiry is needed to find out what something costs. It is an online gallery with no physical space: works are catalogued, priced and bought directly from the site.
The available original, For My Next Trick, is USD 4,400. Stara's signed limited-edition prints — Age of Surveillance, For My Next Trick, Over The Bridge and Eclipsed Village — run from USD 125 to USD 175, though the gallery leads with the original paintings.
For collectors, the useful frame is straightforward: at this price a single original by an artist early in his career costs less than a mid-range sofa, and carries none of the depreciation. Whether it appreciates is unknowable and not the reason to buy. The reason to buy is that the work is resolved, the practice is consistent across several bodies of work, and the price is published rather than negotiated — three things that are far less common in the emerging market than they should be.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Daniel Stara?
Daniel Stara (b. 2000, Florida) is an emerging painter whose surreal, impressionistic landscapes fuse classical imagery with post-apocalyptic unease. His work turns visibility, control and concealment into quietly unsettling images, with digital surveillance and generational disillusionment running underneath. Known works include Age of Surveillance, For My Next Trick, Over The Bridge and Eclipsed Village.
What medium does Daniel Stara work in?
His originals are oil on canvas, built through layered colour fields and controlled gesture, mounted on professional wooden frames and ready to hang with a certificate of authenticity. He also issues signed, numbered giclée prints on William Turner Hahnemühle 190 gsm matte paper.
How much does a Daniel Stara painting cost?
The original oil currently available at Art of NOMA, For My Next Trick (2025, 116 × 175 cm), is USD 4,400. His limited-edition prints run from USD 125 to USD 175 depending on size. Every price is published on the product page.
Where can you buy Daniel Stara's work?
Through Art of NOMA, an online gallery with no physical space. Each available work is listed with its year, dimensions and price, and can be bought directly from its product page.
Is Age of Surveillance a painting or a print?
Both exist, and they are different objects. The original Age of Surveillance is a unique oil on canvas from 2025 measuring 150 × 150 cm; it is not currently available. The Age of Surveillance limited-edition print is a separate signed and numbered giclée, 55 × 55 cm, at USD 125.
See what is available in the Daniel Stara collection, browse all original paintings, or meet the wider roster on the artists page. If you want to talk through a work before committing — condition, framing, shipping, or how it might sit alongside something you already own — start from the For My Next Trick product page and get in touch.