Arpita Singh

Arpita Singh’s (b.1937) paintings should be viewed from a woman’s perspective. In her paintings the inner world of a woman, her home and life around her, looms large. Using a thick textured surface, especially for her oil on canvas paintings, Arpita creates an element of tension, which she says, is a reflection of life around her. Influenced by western masters like Paul Klee and Marc Chagall and Bengali folk art such as the pata paintings and kantha embroidery traditions, Arpita creates a world which is part naive and part real. She uses simple objects like telephones, aeroplanes, bunches of flowers, pots and pans, child-like graffiti on the walls and over-crowded roads, snarled traffic, even guns and violent death as icons of contemporary life. According to Arpita, culture and tradition is handed down from woman to woman, mother to daughter, like the vratas or folk rituals performed by the women in Bengal for the welfare of their family. She claims ‘I am a woman, I think as a woman, I see as a woman. My references are always feminine. This is the starting point’.