Dhairya Nagpal

I paint contact, and the space just before it.

The first thing that ever held my attention was water, and the first thing water taught me was that a touch does not end where it lands. Press a surface once and it carries the ring outward long after the hand has gone. That is the whole physics of my work. A hand reaching for another hand, a childhood pattern laid down in someone at six years old, a painting a stranger recognises themselves in: to me these are the same event happening at different speeds.

So the pictures are rarely about how a thing looks. They are about what it holds, and about the moment before something is either received or missed. I paint hands because hands cannot compose their expression. I paint eyes, and then more eyes than a face should have, because being seen and being watched are not the same experience and the difference is worth a painting. I use gold as the value of feeling. It leaks, it crowns, it stains, and it never behaves.

I am self taught, so nothing in this practice arrived by talent. It arrived by returning to the paper on the days it went badly.

The Forbidden Series is built on the eighteen early maladaptive schemas that psychology uses to name the patterns we grow up unable to say out loud. Abandonment. Defectiveness. The belief that you must be flawless to be allowed to stay.

Each work takes one of those patterns and gives it a body, so a figure in this series is never a portrait of a person. It is a portrait of the pattern that person is standing inside. The face is usually composed. That is the point: the composure is the symptom, and the gold leaves anyway.

It exists because naming a pattern is most of the work of escaping it, and because a painting can hand someone that name without asking them to say anything out loud. Several people have told me they saw themselves in one of these before they had language for it. That is the only review of this series I care about.

Ink, charcoal and wash on textured paper. Acrylic and oil on canvas. Metallic gold and gold leaf. Palette knife, colour pencil, soft pastel, clay, and digital.

The choice of material is an argument, not a preference. The travel work is made on location with a knife because a street or a coastline will not hold still for anyone, and the version you get by waiting is never the one you saw: the paint stays unresolved because the aliveness is in the movement. The studio work is slower and quieter, ink and wash, because what it is looking at does not move at all. Clay appears wherever the work is made in public, because clay forgives everything and hands people something they made on the first afternoon.

Art got me through the worst years I have had, which I treat as a debt rather than a talent. So part of the practice exists to be useful: Art for Covid, which raised funds for pandemic relief and reached over three hundred thousand people, clay in the hands of people who are certain they cannot make anything, and workshops for teams, schools and small groups.

If the work only ever hung on my own wall, it would have failed at the one thing it was made to do.