Oleg Dou: The Master of Photoshop Russian artist Oleg Dou creates images in-between you can call real and surreal. His portraits, which capture a real person, seem unreal, almost painted. In Photoshop he manipulates the images until they look smooth, almost like cyborgs. “I am looking for something bordering between the beautiful and the repulsive, living and dead. I want to attain the feeling of presence one can get when walking by a plastic manikin.” [Oleg Dou] He developed a real talent for Photoshop during his summer jobs at advertise agencies, but he wanted to retouch his own works rather than those of others. He started photographing everything around him and retouched them in Photoshop. This was in the beginning of the digital era, when retouching was quite debatable. The role of the photographer became more questioned than ever and the works of Dou illustrated the lack of importance of photographical talent. He goes into extremes with retouching and manipulating his portraits, one can say that he is not a photographer at all. Like the old masters, Dou incorporates a piece of himself into the portraits. The look and expression on the faces of his models are replica’s of his own facial expressions. By stripping eyelashes, eyebrows and other small details, the models become physically and emotionally alike. In this way, the portraits are all some kind of self portraits of Dou himself. Dou does not randomly retouches his photos in Photoshop, but actually applies techniques related to painting. In order to create more depth around his subjects he applies little layers of transparency like painters do with veneer, to create an illusion of moist atmosphere, which creates more dept. Like painters, Dou works months on one piece before it is finished. This illustrates that Dou is definitely not a photographer, but as he calls it, a digital painter.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 13:58:30 +0000
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