Kuwaiti born, Houston based award-winning contemporary portrait artist Ali Alamdar started his art journey in 2016 by making a simple portrait drawing, which unbeknownst to him, eventually led to everything else. Alamdar moved to Texas when he was 12-years old and went back and forth between the two places until coming back to pursue a Bachelor of Science in Marketing degree from the University of Houston.

Alamdar credits his picking up of the arts to the fact he was always surrounded by art. He has always been inspired by his grandparents’ drawings as a child and was taught how to shade and create different values using graphite pencils at the age of 4. The simple knowledge of how to shade made it easier for Ali to start drawing since he possessed a very simple understanding on how to create forms, which he later built on and developed into something much bigger; a lifestyle and a burning passion.

Ali Alamdar is recognized for his incomplete paintings that depict figures and portraits with missing areas, most notably the lips. Alamdar is fascinated with incompleteness and imperfections and states that he creates his art in an attempt to spread the perspective he has on imperfections and hopes that people start seeing the beauty in it as well and begin embracing them rather than wasting their entire lives seeking impossible, and unattainable perfection. Alamdar also states that “Life itself is incomplete, it never is complete until the person passes away. Until then, they are, and will always be just a work in progress”. Ali gets inspiration for his works from everything around him, one example he always brings up is that of buildings in the process of being built, surrounded by scaffolding and unused materials that will eventually be utilized and turned into something spectacular.

Alamdar’s main goal with his paintings is to create something that seems to be frozen in time, on its way to being finished and fully complete, but never will be. It creates a sense of dynamism and creates a timeless look that will not look outdated in a few years. “What I love the most and what I try to do with all my paintings is that I make them look like I will come back and finish them someday. But I keep my works in the stage between having an empty canvas, and a fully rendered painting, it’s just more interesting to me and has a lot of hidden meanings.”