In the 70s, Arpita Singh faced a creative block. She felt there was something wrong with her technique. So the next eight-odd years went into a kind of practice session. Lines and dots filled her canvas, as she went back to basics. “I was in the process of unlearning and relearning, like how a child practices handwriting,” the 85-year-old artist says. Slowly the lines gave way to random strips of colours, till her figurative canvas emerged in the 80s. The works created during this “experimental period”, appeared in an exhibition in New York in 2017, aptly titled, Tying Down Time. Singh’s recent works are on display at the Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi, titled Meeting, till March 14.
“I paint simply because I feel the urge to.
I believe most artists do that. But there are some who paint driven by the demands of the market. I don’t consider them artists. Painting is something that comes from within. No one can dictate what you put on the canvas,” says the artist, whose work 'Wish Dream' a 16-panel mural based on the Tibetan version of the Ramayana—went under the hammer for Rs 9.6 crore in 2010, making her the top-selling female artist in India. This was a marked departure from her first group show in 1961 under the banner of The Unknown—a body of artists of which she was a founder-member—where she managed to sell only one work.
Hers is a busy canvas, with blue a prominent colour. “My studio is full of the many shades of blue and I often find myself reaching out for this colour,” she says.
Singh’s earlier works are reminiscent of the late French-Russian artist Marc Chagall. Like him, Singh’s canvas is an abstract one bordering on surrealism with figures that seem to defy gravity. After graduating in fine arts from Delhi Polytechnic—her husband, artist Paramjit Singh, was a year senior—she donned the hat of a textile designer at the Weavers’ Service Centre, part of the Handloom Board of India, in the 60s. It was her training there that had a lasting impression on her work—where texture plays an important role—and she took to using the impasto technique, placing paint on a surface in thick layers, much like one would use warp and weft while weaving.
“My time as a textile designer made me look at fabrics with a new eye. My broken lines are a reflection of the textured effect of Kantha embroidery, and the colour scheme harks back to Rajasthani prints,” says the artist, who has also been influenced by miniature art and folk art. Though, she asserts, “It is not the folk art that is showcased in tony galleries and mass-produced for Western buyers. My inspiration comes from the folk art practiced in villages.”
When her daughter—the late artist Anjum Singh—was growing up, the modernist contemporary artist would rely on symbolism to express her views. Later, her tryst with the world around became more direct as political events seeped into her frame. Her 1983 work, 'My Mother', was born out of a Northeast masscre scene depicted on a magazine cover; then there is the 2006 work, Watching, which originated from the Best Bakery case judgement. “An artist lives in society and participates in social events that unfold every day. Needless to say, they find a representation on canvas,” says Singh, who regards MF Husain’s panoramic 1955 work Zamin with its pronounced angular lines a lasting impression. Singh’s world is one of lines too.