I don't know why sometimes I get frightened Painting

watercolour on black rubber This one is from Darukhanawala’s innovative black rubber series and combines his returning preoccupations with round shapes and lines: the perpetual, classical circle returning me to age-old truths and repetitions, and the progressive, marching Hegelian lines, relentlessly marching like time and human age – sometimes with progressive élan, other times with hubris, but always human, perhaps all too human. Darukhanawala’s titles don’t so much ‘explain’ the work; they are rather part of it. They are signposts … but only for those who choose to read them. The picture-songs work just as well without them. It just depends who you are. It’s refreshing, in these times of gimmickry and ‘clever’ originality to have art that is predicated on the individual viewer, not the overriding vision and world-view of the artist. One of the unassuming, quiet attractions of Darukhanawala’s work is that he seems to know what he wants to do and when he’s finished (he has an uncanny knack of knowing when to stop adding to the picture). As he himself says: I knew what I wanted with this painting, and I knew when I was done, without quite knowing how or precisely why I wanted it. It was a journey I guess – one I often only know about after I’ve undertaken it – and that’s a major element of the creating, discovering process of art for me.’ Such an approach naturally leads to unexpected accidents, fighting with the picture in medias res and, above all, with the concept of the picture. Dimensions above include frame (unframed: 17 x 170 mm.)