A hand, reaching for a soul.

Within

Sri Yantra

Nine triangles, and no outside. Paint the face and the pattern answers.

Motion

Sudarshan Chakra

Only itself while it turns. The knife goes down before the street can settle.

One line

Kolam

One line at dawn, walked over by dusk, drawn again. Attendance, not inspiration.

Duty

Ashoka Chakra

A wheel exists to carry what is not the wheel. Some of this is a debt being paid.

01  Where it began

A pencil, paper, and an eraser, the way it begins for everyone. Nobody taught him and nobody had to. Art arrived before he had a word for it, and he kept at it the only way available to a kid with no academy and no mentor: by making the next thing, then the next one.

02  What it carried him through

Life did what life does. There were years that lifted and years that took, and a stretch that went all the way to the bottom. Art was the thing that kept showing up when very little else did. It is not a hobby standing beside his life. It is the reason he found the way out of the worst of it, and it has been his solace since.

03  Learning to say it

Slowly the work stopped being about how things looked and started being about what they hold. He turned the same attention inward: attachment, the patterns psychology calls schemas, the shapes a childhood leaves in a person. The Forbidden Series came out of that, and out of wanting other people to find themselves in it and feel less alone with it.

04  Nature, always

Nature has been the one constant. Water, light, mountains, the ocean, the street after rain. He returns to it because it never performs for anyone, and because it is where he first learned that the smallest touch travels further than it has any right to.

01  What he works for

Nagpal paints the states people keep presentable: grief worn as composure, ambition that will not switch off, closeness that holds a person upright. The work exists so those states have somewhere to be seen.

02  What the work focuses on

Figures. Hands, eyes, and the weight between people. A recurring language runs through the work: multiplied eyes, koi where sight should be, and gold used as the value of feeling. It leaks, it crowns, it stains.

03  Mediums

Ink, charcoal and wash on textured paper. Acrylic and oil on canvas. Metallic gold and gold leaf, palette knife, colour pencil, digital composition, and clay in public workshops.

04  Now

Commissioned pieces in acrylic and oil. A travel series drawn on location, Vietnam most recently. And the next rooms of this site: Across Mediums and The Studio, with process films.

The Forbidden Series

Eight works in ink, charcoal and gold, built on the eighteen early maladaptive schemas that psychology uses to describe the patterns we grow up unable to name. Abandonment, defectiveness, the need to be perfect to be allowed to stay. Each painting takes one of them and gives it a body.

It exists because naming a pattern is most of the work of getting out from under it, and because a painting can hand someone that name without asking them to say anything out loud.

9 works · ink, charcoal & gold

Corporate & team days

Clay, foam clay, resin and fluid art, run for groups who mostly arrive convinced they cannot make anything. Everyone leaves with a finished object. Previously for Palo Alto Networks on International Women's Day.

Schools & universities

Hands-on sessions built around one medium and one idea, sized for a class or a full year group, with the making done in the room rather than demonstrated at the front.

Private & small groups

Smaller sessions for a handful of people, usually mixed media, where there is time to work on one piece properly instead of racing a clock.