The Quest

I came to London and took a diploma in Mechanical Engineering and a post degree diploma in Fuel Technology. I worked as a fuel technologist and then as a Civil Servant. At the moment I am concentrating on painting and poetry.

I have never studied art and I am a self-taught painter. Mine has been a solo struggle and no one has ever helped me. Being a minority within minorities, I had to suffer extreme kind of discrimination everywhere. To me art is not a profession but a search to find significant forms necessary for survival and for development of your soul. Attraction towards painting came to me at an early age but I could not see any point in studying it, as one has to develop it personally. I pursued my technical and scientific studies, since I liked physics, mathematics and chemistry. I never found any conflict between arts and sciences. It was so in Europe also during the renaissance.

Claws of Moon Durlabh Singh

Eye was before the word and language. It has more sophisticated language and that is why I am drawn to oil paintings. It is an intensely difficult media but more rewarding. Ordinary language is restrictive, it sees in black and white. Poetry and paintings are more appropriate to express the multi-dimensional world.

In metaphysical terms, space is the fountainhead or source of the matter, the matter being only the geometry of space. Hydrogen and oxygen are not wet but when these combine wetness is produced. Water is unlike its constituents but still contains these. Amalgamation of the two elements has produced something very different.

In the Still Life genre, all things of movement are absent. Emotional context related to human presence or other living things does not seduce you. It is a state of pure contemplation of forms and colors and of the vast field underlying it. We envisage the world in three dimensions but painting is two-dimensional and the problem is as how to represent three-dimensional sensations into two. In the naturalistic imitative tradition, it was achieved with tonal values or chiaroscuro. Now a days so many artists have resorted to sculpted forms. It is difficult to avoid this illusion of 3D. You have to find some other way.

7 PM Durlabh Singh

Each pictorial element has its own life in the total composition of an artwork. These elements are crying out for their proper due. The artist is in a tight spot and has to exert himself creatively in order to produce a sort of alchemy to accommodate all of these elements and even to surpass their individual reality into something more profound and whole. Call it an alchemical process or sort of magic, but it shifts the artist into a non-ordinary reality, thus creating a genuine work of art. It combines human realities of mind, spirit and emotions together with an unknown element of x-dimension.

It is to this element that the viewers respond, and feel that element of magic, which cannot be arrived at by rational means. Most Still Life ends in a decorative element, pleasing and harmonious to our visual perceptions it may be but that is not what I am trying to achieve. It is something vaster, deeper of human sensibilities, which goes beyond the normal of average reality.

I was born in Kenya and I used to look at African carvings and started painting in somewhat cubist style. I did not know anything about Picasso then and was surprised to see his paintings done similarly. Picasso has taken wholesale from African art but no critic speaks of him as influenced by it. Van Gogh's art changed completely under the influence of Japanese prints. Buddhism and its art, which comes originally from India, changed the culture of Japan. When I go back to my roots, western people think that European artists have influenced me. Great art is always born of meeting of two cultures.

Lovers Durlabh Singh

Art like life is a very complex affair. It is like going into a forest and holding one leaf for explanation when there are thousands of other leaves in the jungle.