Hi,
I’m Udnua and I’ve been an illustrator for over twenty years. My creative path has been winding – through book illustration, album covers, comics, and eventually character design and game art. I kept searching for my place, and that wandering brought me many valuable experiences, but the themes of my work drifted further and further from what genuinely interests me. At some point, I realized I hadn’t drawn anything truly for myself in a long time. I was chasing commission after commission, project after project, and somewhere along the way, I lost myself as a creator.
That’s why I decided to start “Oneiric Anamnesis”, an archive of works drawn from my inner world and everything that fuels it. I’ve been lucid dreaming since childhood, and I can honestly say it feels like a parallel life, whose fragments I love to record through illustration. I can’t bring anyone with me where I travel in dreams, but through my work, I can offer a glimpse of that world here.
The subjects I draw are shaped not only by dreams but also by the books I return to, and over the years several thematic currents have gradually emerged. On one side, there’s H. P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, and Hermann Hesse. On the other, Joseph Campbell, Erich Fromm, Mircea Eliade, and Vladimir Propp, when I try to understand how myths, symbols, and rituals truly work. I’ve always been drawn to ancient cultures, the way they perceived the world differently and how deeply they lived inside magical reality. And speaking of that, I also naturally reach for John Keel, Jacques Vallée, and Robert Monroe.
The figures I draw are sometimes nearly literal, transferred straight from experience onto paper, and other times they’re just a mark – because there’s no form that could carry the level of abstraction some of them bring. I work with many tools, including digital ones like Photoshop, but my true love lies in traditional techniques, which remain my main focus. I enjoy the scent of paper, the sound of a nib scratching the surface, the steady flow of a line, and that final, physical gesture -blowing graphite dust from the desk. Ink, for me, gives the image its pulse and warmth. It sinks into the paper like into tissue, leads a dark line like a vein, and only then does what I saw stop being just a memory and begin to breathe on the page. This tactile bond with the material brings me genuine joy. It completes the act of creation, makes it more tangible, and with the subjects I explore, it simply feels right.
Feel free to wander. The archive is open.
ONEIRIC ANAMNESIS 