“That was the first time I ever felt like my art was worth something.”
What CHOSEN makes clear is that Darold the painter has always been there. Before the records, before the tours, before the world knew his name. His earliest memories of creating go back to Harlem, sitting in a barbershop with his father. “I was drawing in my notebook while my pops was getting his haircut,” he said. “He grabbed my sketches and started passing them around the shop. That was the first time I ever felt like my art was worth something. He made me feel like what I had was real.”
That encouragement stuck. He went on to attend art school as a teen, developing a visual language before he ever recorded a track. Music took over fast, but the love for painting never left. The pandemic gave him the time and space to return to it.
In his SoHo loft, the two sides of his artistry momentously sit side by side. One room for sound, mics, speakers, a laptop with open sessions from DAROLD. The other, stripped down and clean. No distractions. Just walls, canvases, and floor space to move. From figuration to abstraction and even mixed media, the works encompassed a range of different styles and mediums, reflecting his multidisciplinary approach. While the paintings in CHOSEN are embedded with labored technique and theory, they’re rooted in honesty with memories stretched into form.
The work itself pulls directly from the emotional core of DAROLD. Some pieces are quiet and contemplative. Others hit like a verse. There’s a physicality to them, brushwork that feels like it was done in the middle of a thought.
