Indian painter Lakshya Bhargava took an unlikely route to the studio. Raised in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, he first met contemporary art at around 18, having absorbed his visual education through Hindi, English and Japanese animation. He initially studied biology and prepared for India's medical entrance examinations before changing course, moving to Bengaluru to train at the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, where he graduated in 2022. After taking part in the Students' Biennale at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and completing residencies, Bhargava moved to London in 2024 to study painting at the Slade. There he wrestled with doubt: he wondered whether painting alone was enough, and felt pressure to make the work more conceptual and overtly political to justify its existence. A visit to the 2024 Turner Prize exhibition broke that spell. Encountering Claudette Johnson's paintings and drawings, he was moved to tears by the confidence of an artist who simply trusted paint and line as her language. That encounter reshaped his practice. Bhargava now builds pictures from his own photographs of friends and the rooms he inhabits, sometimes returning to an image months later when it has acquired a new meaning. Compositions may follow the rule of thirds or deliberately abandon it. His acrylics are laid in thin, watery washes indebted to the Bengal wash tradition, and he manufactures the warm, honeyed light that runs through his scenes entirely from imagination and colour mixing. Two recent canvases show how personal the method has become. One grew from sleepless first nights in a new London flat, when he made small watercolours of a street lamp on the wall; months later he embedded one of those studies inside the finished painting, layering two versions of the same room. Another, begun around the new year, was left partly unfinished after an argument with its sitter, holding the beginning of a relationship and its strain in a single frame. He hopes the pictures simply encourage viewers to slow down and notice the small, ordinary moments they already live.