“It takes a lot of directing to get the photo right,” says Uldalen. He works mainly with people he knows
personally simply because it tends to be easier to rope friends into modeling sessions. Uldalen doesn’t go into the photo shoots with a solid idea of what he wants. He spends a lot of time deliberating over poses, adjusting and readjusting everything from the models’ clothing to the position of their fingers.
“The whole photo shoot looks incredibly clumsy, since I’m not a photographer,” Uldalen admits. He adds that he’s not incredibly skilled in behind-the-lens work, it’s more of a means to an end and his least favorite part of the process.
The photos are only the seeds for Uldalen’s creations. They don’t dictate the final product. Uldalen is more concerned with the mood of the piece than an accurate recreation of a photo. Oftentimes, he needs to stray far from the original image in order to establish the desired effect.
Every photo Uldalen will use in a painting goes through Photoshop. He cuts up the photographs, sometimes pasting pieces into other images. He’ll alter the colors, turn people and objects into strange positions—“Take an arm here, and a face there,” he says—anything that will help evoke the dreamy quality that runs through his work. In a sense, a lot of what seems very real in the paintings isn’t. The skin tones often differ in appearance from the source photos and the backgrounds have either been altered or removed completely. At the same time, though, he does say that he wants the character in the painting to look like the model. “But, that’s only to challenge myself,” he adds.
Born in 1986, Uldalen is a young artist with a distinctive voice and an incredible skill. He has been drawing since childhood and studied to be an art teacher, but considers himself primarily a self-taught painter. He went online to look up oil painting tips and found friends with a similar interest. “We learned from each other,” he says.
He’s only been working in oils for about four years, which makes his work all the more impressive. “I always read that oils were much harder to work with,” he says. “For me, oil painting was so much easier. When I first tried oil painting, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.”
His interest is primarily in painting people. He’s not so interested in the backgrounds. In fact, many of pieces are heavy on negative space. He likes to create “something dynamic and exciting to watch with very little.”