Divya Singh sold her first art work in 2019. But the sale didn’t make her happy. It was a brown canvas depicting her mother’s room. “I went home and cried. I just couldn’t let go,” she says.At the outset, Singh appears to be exactly the 31-year-old she is. An oversized shirt, boots, hair tied up in a messy bun, bangles on one arm and rings on the fingers of the other. Her shimmery nails match her silver eyeshadow and she rounds up the look with an orange, flower-shaped pimple patch. Casual and carefree, with a hint of grunge.What gives away the person beneath the surface are the paintings mounted on the walls around her at Delhi’s Shrine gallery for her solo show — Sounds from the Attic — oil paintings of what sometime seem like stolen, intimate moments from life that elude notice. At other times, manifestations of a perpetually wondering mind. Ode to Solitude/ Ophelia’s Song (Courtesy: Divya Singh)“I was always an introvert, even as a child. So much so that I would often communicate with my family through writing. But I particularly would draw a lot to spend time with my sister because she would spend a lot of time drawing,” says Delhi-based Singh, “Over time, drawing became something I could not only do but a place where I existed. It was something that I did as a way to live, and I think I got good at it.”She did.In Slowly/ Drift, exhibited at the Delhi Contemporary Art Week in 2022, she paints a scene from inside an empty bus. At the centre is a pair of feet hanging from the edge of a seat. The canvas is blue with deep, solid shadows. The composition is poignant in its depiction of the respite, or perhaps escape, that arrives at the end of an all-too-familiar hard day.“Divya is an incredibly skilled painter, with a rare ability to keep the dreamlike imagery of her inner world alive on the canvas. There is something haunting about her work — the images seem to hover between memory and imagination, between something lived and something half-remembered. It is this quality that gives the work its emotional depth: It feels intimate and personal, yet strangely familiar,” says Anahita Taneja, co-founder, Shrine Empire that has been representing her since 2021.Six years after that first sale, Singh’s works now range from Rs 25,000 toRs 12 lakh, depending on the scale and complexity. “It was a rite of passage. After that first painting got sold, it changed me. I am not attached in the same way that I would have been in the past,” she says. Tell Mother I’m Home/ Afterlife (Courtesy: Divya Singh)At her ongoing show, there is Vestal’s Dream II — a painting of something as innocuous as a window. Yet the work breathes, in the way the transparent curtain floats as a gust of wind passes through the window.Story continues below this adSingh is able to bring time to a standstill. She recalls a moment when she saw a neighbour, living across the street, resting on a Sunday afternoon. “He was asleep on the floor with his hand hanging outside the room and into the balcony,” she says, demonstrating with her hand. “Plants were swaying in the wind, and it made me emotional. When you see humans, what human life is… it is so fragile. I remember thinking about the cost of peace because we have entire nations at war. A single afternoon of peace is what we go to warfor, right? I have this existential, not exactly anxiety, but a sensation that it could all go away. But in my mind, this moment of peace, I can stretch it to infinity,” she elaborates.One of the qualities of Singh’s works that engages the viewer almost instantaneously is the luminosity. It lends warmth to compositions that might otherwise be read as isolating.In The Softness Of Your Dreams X Paris, Texas, on a green canvas, she paints a parking lot. Empty, except for a solitary car, illuminated by three street lights. The black sky, the dense shadows render the piece a haunting air. For Singh, though, it is an expression of the “depth of solitude.” “There is this joy of existing in a blind spot, where no one can see you. Just having the space to be yourself, being alone in the space and not feeling sad,” she says.The process of achieving this ethereal luminosity is less metaphysical than her thoughts. It is a laborious endeavour she undertakes with every single work that she paints three times: first in watercolours, then with acrylic over it and finally with oil. The mixed-media layering technique allows light to bounce off each medium on the canvas, creating a lit-from-within effect.Story continues below this adShe discovered it during her Bachelor’s at the Delhi College of Art (2016). “We had to submit our drawings before we would make the paintings. But I started painting on the canvas directly. That gave me creative freedom because the image would look different in each medium but it gave me an idea of what it was going to become,” says Singh, who did her Master’s from Shiv Nadar University (2018).It becomes evident that light is more than just a visual device for her when the conversation moves from technique to divinity, not necessarily as a religious concept but as an ontological one.“Light affects the way I perceive everything. My earliest memories were informed by it. I have a deep relationship with light and it’s one that I have never really questioned or articulated. I just understand it as love, as something that is divine and integral to my existence,” she says.On the surface Singh’s carefree appearance seems to be at odds with the contemplative quality of her work, much like the light and the dark in her paintings. She argues they are not opposites, veering into another memory to make her case.Story continues below this ad How to Cure a Ghost x Spirit of a Beehive (Courtesy: Divya Singh)Growing up, her mother would lie down in her room after work, without switching on the lights. A young Singh, having waited for long, snuggled up with her. “The lights from the street would filter in. In that moment, darkness became my mother,” she says, “Darkness was never the opposite of light for me. It is a different kind of comfort.”That was the room Singh painted in the work that was so difficult to sell. This is why.