First published in: Picture Postcards 2003 - 2006, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery (2006).
Several decades ago, Arpita Singh, a little girl, left her familiar home in Kolkata and went with her mother and brother to Delhi. She had just lost her father and it was such a long journey. Remembrances of it became subsumed in other journeys undertaken by individuals and groups. Memories and mappings of dislocations and discoveries, of nostalgia and pain, of excitement and anxiety have surged through her images. But Arpita Singh also responds to other dynamics in the world, to the interface between time and space, between history and present context. In fact, she absorbs the complexities of the world and represents them in her own distinctive way through the sensuous use of paint and brush, signalling joy, wonder, menace and melancholy in an intricate kaleidoscope of human emotions.
Arpita Singh’s recent oils and watercolours seem to view life as events unfolding on a stage. She has not cast away her earlier solipsistic visions, dreams, fantasies laced with irony, anxiety and undercurrents of eroticism. But she has introduced a new note of charting out life’s course, evoking locales “which in turn evoke memories.” Associations play an important role in Arpita’s image making. Painting a seated man in a black coat and white dhoti in a resigned stance set in motion processes that led to the conceptualization of an iconic triptych Whatever is Here [1], inspired by the Mahabharat. Here the central figure of Dhritarashtra expresses dignity and fortitude while the turbulent actions and their impact are described through multiple narratives. But the pose of the epic central character is like the ordinary man of the earlier painting.
Arpita has initiated a dialogue with history, with myth, with context and with location. A few years earlier, during the release of her sketchbook, artist A Ramachandran had said that Arpita’s images were primarily dominated by two identities - the mother and the daughter. Perhaps, a third identity could also be added - that of a dreamer, a woman given to visions.
She also brings to her paintings the role of a bystander, an observer of theatre of the world. No longer is everything located in dream-time, but the passage of real time and history gets recorded. She maps the terrain of her world as a background as in the painting, Evening Walk [2]. In My Lollipop City; Gemini Rising the painted map marking the landmarks of the capital foregrounds the historic city and its people, which is also her home.
Arpita draws on the subconscious for her forms. The first mark on the blank white surface is a daunting challenge, a provocative invitation. “The first encounter with blank space is scary,” she says. Once Arpita has smeared the first daub of paint, started with a figure, her subliminal urges take over. Playfully, she paints familiar forms and names them like a child to establish her control over them. Sometimes, the forms could be flowers like the grass lilies, which spring up just before the rains in her tiny front garden; sometimes, it could be carnations in a bouquet gifted to her. There could also be fruits. Earlier she painted cherries and mangoes. In her recent works, she is engrossed with the custard apple. She says that she likes the nubby form. Occasionally, animals appear as they are doing now. She says with a laugh, “They are four-legged creatures. They could be deers or goats.” But then they do become a part of her personal mythology, which hints at a complex imagination. Repetition of forms is an important element in her visual language. “A tree is a repetition of a small leaf.” It is a way of constructing her world on canvas and establishing her control. There is also the influence of print culture. In this age of mechanical reproduction of texts and images the graphic element holds a tantalising possibility.
Arpita has her unique way of simplifying forms. It is a combination of childlike innocence of folk art and a sophisticated sensibility. The only comparable European artist that comes to mind in terms of a certain naivete in articulation is Chagall. Both share an ability to see the world with a sense of wonder. The pictorial code carries references to momentous contemporary events. In Watching [3], a group of grey-coated men seated on chairs have their heads turned towards the left waiting for something to happen. They are placed against a background of letters, words and numbers, which apparently make no sense at all. But for the artist, they are not a haphazard collection, but relate to words in the judgment of Best Bakery case, a fallout of the communal riots in Gujarat.
Just as the printed words and images have an impact on her imagination, so also various elements of visual culture play upon her. When she was young and had to economise on paper, she would draw on whatever was available. “I made drawings on handouts and catalogues.” The printed text is automatically integrated with her images. Besides, she is intensely attracted by hoardings, signboards, leaflets, and newspapers. Her images thus are not just a homogenous narrative but speak in many voices. She is fascinated by old maps. She is deeply moved by scenes from films. Like her painting, On The Seashore [4], in which a group of men and women is posed against the backdrop of the sea, had been a germ in her mind but took shape after seeing a Turkish film. Of course, she renders it in her distinctive visual style.
Four women and nine men are seated and standing as if posing for a group photograph. Some of the figures are draped, others are naked. The male nudes stand with hieratic stiffness like the Jain monks in traditional paintings and sculptures. The chairs on which the figures sit are a bright red. In the foreground, there is a vivid pink floral carpet as is often seen in Arpita’s earlier works. There is a border of pink and blue flowers on the side and on the lower edge; there is a border of custard apples and palm trees, which are new in her repertoire of motifs. In the distance, there is a strip of sand and a sliver of blue sea with a little white boat floating on it like a toy. Arpita, who has often located her images in the dense urban jungle or charming, interior domestic spaces, has wafted her characters to the seashore. The narrative embedded in the scene is intriguing. Who are these men and women - family, friends, and inmates of an old age home? Each individual has a story masked by a stoic demeanour. It is a human drama that invites gentle probing.
The theatricality is carried forward to the two paintings Watching and Evening Walk [5]. Both images are dominated by men wearing coats. In Evening Walk, the men are wearing black coats reminiscent of a gaggle of lawyers. Did Arpita come upon such scenes in the Delhi High Court area on Sher Shah Roadorare the law courts preying on her mind? With Arpita one can never be sure. She revels in ambiguities and transformations. There was the large mural-like painting Wish-Dream that she did a few years back where she set out to paint a goddess standing on a lotus. It so happened during painting, the lotus became a ruffled pillow. The layerings of meaning continue to tease and hold viewer attention. This mural-like painting done some six or seven years ago influenced Arpita’s visual language. For one thing, from about this time the scale of her paintings became larger.
Arpita has been reinterpreting myths and icons for the last few years. Many of the myths are from the Mahabharat. The painting Thirty Six Clouds Yudhishthir Approaching Heaven [6], where the virtuous prince is seen climbing skywards in an airplane and the other one Whatever is Here [7] where Sanjaya, the rapporteur, reporting on the progress of the war to the blind king Dhritarashtra, looks into the distance through binoculars are the whimsical reinterpretations, not only reflect Arpita’s wry humour, but also show her conflating mythic time with real time today.
References to present day reality are encoded in the paintings in many ways. She writes a key to the topics in her painting, Whatever is Here. Among them are the subjects ‘War widows’ and ‘women violated’ having direct bearing on society today. The letterings on the blue ground of the painting Watching [8] are taken from the judgment of the Best Bakery case as reported in the newspapers. For any sensitive citizen, the developments in the Gujarat riots offered a shattering encounter with indescribable violence. For an artist of Arpita's stature, the violence is never directly represented. That would be too naturalistic and illustrative. Instead, it is internalised and expressed through a cryptic code of subtle metaphors. The code ‘Lost River’ in Whatever is Here, could relate to the controversial project of the previous NDA government of tracking the fabular Saraswati river but visually, it also maps a river of memories, which is buried under layers of experience and continues to nurture life by its subterranean flow.
The seated men in grey coats in Watching are looking sideways. They appear to be on a stage set trying to look at something happening in the wings, which concerns them. Are they waiting for an exciting turn of events, something wondrous perhaps? Anticipation is written on their faces. The weariness of living is marked on their wrinkled skins, creased clothes. And yet they are framed with a border of carnations. The element of theatre in this painting is striking. But this quality of search, of looking for something, runs through her images. In works where people are looking skywards, she says, "Heaven is where you keep your memories."
A city map as background makes its debut as images of black-coated men appear in Evening Walk [9] The bunch of men is crossing the street. Each has a hand in his pocket, which is a playful observation. In the background, a pack of green-clad men on two-wheelers whizzes past on a pink street. Talking of her long-standing attraction to maps, she says that she became excited about the visual possibilities of a complex network of roads and alleyways with signposts marking directions after a visit to Shekhavati a year ago. This painting has the customary painted border missing. In recent times, Arpita tends to locate the image in a place that she has visited. I recall a painting she did after a trip to Kolkata where place and street names of that city were scrawled on the canvas. Nevertheless, it is always an imagined landscape.
An imagined road map of Delhi, with all its landmarks, becomes the focal point of the painting, Lollipop City [10]. In this fascinating criss-cross of streets and monuments one can always mark one's own location. This painting once again is the enchanting combination of caprice and serious thought. The sense of history that Arpita invokes gives the image a different dimension beyond its visual appeal. The same sense echoes on surfaces in Arpita’s watercolours as well. In one watercolour both a map with such locational markings as petrol pump, cotton candy seller, as well as the priest's head from Mohenjodaro appears.
The character of Arpita’s watercolours is quite different from her oil paintings. Instead of the broad, lavish brushstrokes, the graphic strength of repetitive motifs, the simplification of forms and the brilliant and subversive play of colours, the watercolours are an intricate network of lines using merely two colours - indigo blue and Indian red. Arpita’s watercolours create a shadowy world of elusive memories. One is frantically searching for something or someone but waves of forgetfulness induced by the quotidian washes over the search. The dense filling up of the surface is reminiscent of folk art forms like the Bengal kantha. There is a crossover of motifs like the custard apple in both the watercolours and the oils.
One of the watercolours with a woman lying across the surface is a very significant work in Arpita’s oeuvre. It expresses her philosophy of man’s relationship with nature and nurture, with the physical world and its history. The woman lying on her side has her ribs and vertebrae exposed. There are other works where the figures have their ribs exposed. This again could be determined by two influencing factors. A few years ago, Arpita had been ill and underwent surgery. Her interest in anatomical details may have begun then but was subsequently fed by medical manuals with anatomical images supplied to her by a friend who is a neurosurgeon. And Arpita who devours the printed word and graphic images needless to say was excited by what she saw.
In the watercolour already mentioned, the woman lying on the ground could be the embodiment of nature, the figure of mother earth. There is a tree behind her with blue flowers that seems to be growing out of her and it is like the tree of life with its roots and spreading canopy of branches. The lying woman and the tree are witnesses to the endless theatre of life of birth, sexuality, renunciation and then negation. Is the woman a witness or is she like a great goddess dreaming such illusory scenes? One must notice the foetal form in the foreground, the woman in a dancing pose wearing only a bra and a man sitting on a background of maps.
In the watercolour with the Mohenjodaro priest figure, the familiar men with guns appear. There are five of them and their very stony expressions mark them as goons. The camels in the background and the presence of the city map signal the deep impression her trip to Rajasthan has made on her.
Again in another watercolour, the figures are looking left in surprise. The drawing uses custard apples, deer, tree roots - all favourite motifs at present.Thebackground surface is a notational record of whatever passes through Arpita's stream of consciousness. The painting titled Woman Smoking [11] has the central figure of a woman clad in black and painted on a graph-like background poses a powerful presence. Black, Arpita says, is a difficult colour for her to handle and so she addresses herself wholeheartedly to the black garments in her painting. She refers to her use of maps and graph-like paper subconsciously rooted to her childhood insecurities. Trying to conjecture the subliminal sources of her imagery is a fascinating exercise. Many of the motifs that appear in her paintings reflect her delighted response to unusual objects with the spontaneity of a child’s play. And at the same time, a sophisticated imagination critically assays the visual possibilities of the motifs.
Whether it is oils or watercolours, the vibrant energy of Arpita’s imagination and visual language offers an exhilarating encounter. The images can engage the viewer in a profound and intimate dialogue. In her earlier works, the artist seemed to be a little girl or a brooding woman negotiating an incomprehensible world by juxtaposing innocent childhood memories and familiar domestic paraphernalia with menacing forms and figures. In her recent works, she appears to have come to terms with that world and is managing to establish her control over it. She is stepping out of her domestic interiors and engaging with a larger arena of life. The palpable menace in her earlier city streets has been transformed and the streets have become bustling theatres of activities. While Arpita is comprehending a larger view of life, a tragic undercurrent weaves itself into her painting behind all the brilliant colours and the vitality. It is as if the artist, the creator, knows in the darkest depths of her mind how black oblivion is stalking the luminous world of her creation. The paintings are therefore an act of courage, of defiance, a record of life’s exuberance in the face of death.
References
1. Page 15
2. Page 7
3. Page 9
4. Page 11
5. Page 7
6. Page 13
7. Page 15
8. Page 9
9. Page 7
10. Page 3
11. Page 29
Endnote
All quotes are from a series of interviews with the artist conducted over several months.