Arpita Singh (b. 1937)

Geeti Sen, Image and Imagination, Five Contemporary Artists in India, Mapin, Ahmedabad, 1996, p.115, illustrated

cracquelure to red car, cracquelure, losses and lifting to white impasto of background, canvas stable, color of red card slightly more magenta and orange of duck brighter in reality, as viewed
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"It is not a subject; it is Form. The subject comes in at the last moment when every form is in its place and made visible. That is why titles are not important in my work. " (Arpita Singh rpt. in Geeti Sen, Image and Imagination, Five Contemporary Artists in India, Ahmedabad, 1996, p. 98).

Arpita creates a magical world, her canvases are a pattern of everyday objects; chairs, tables, clocks, vases and cars painted with an emphasis on their form and texture.  Arpita uses multiple perspective and distortions in scale, covering every inch of the canvas in a horror vacuii, where the fabric of a dress or the petals on a flower become as important as the representation of the human figure.  The artist Nilima Sheikh says of Arpita's work "For her the pleasure and ploy of ornamentation is both celebration and disguise.  Along with modernist techniques of painting she foregrounds other devices to celebrate the surface: the use of decorative motifs, patterning and what I would like to call illuminating, inexorably bringing to life, tending a surface she fears might dull. Or if it is not offered life through touch or sign, even die." (Gayatri Sinha et al, Expressions & Evocations: Contemporary  Women Artists of India, Mumbai, 1996, p. 72).

In Arpita's works the objects are metaphors, representing her thoughts and fears.  'Images that are familiar to us are shown afresh in a context which gives them a new meaning' (ibid). With 'Red Car in Rose Garden Arpita uses texture to create resonance and rhythm to bring feeling and tension into her pictures... dots and stripes, checks and flowered patterns begin to assert themselves... the patterns and textures here create the mood.' (Geeti Sen, Image and Imagination, Five Contemporary Artists in India, Ahmedabad, 1996, p.114). Dalmia identifies Arpita's work of the 1980s as becoming more lucid, 'bringing to the fore many contradictions of life in India... There is a Red Car in a Rose Garden disturbing the peace and quiet,.. The uneasiness and distance is created between humans invading objects almost as if they have a life of their own.  The stillness of her humans is contrasted by the highly animated space surrounding them consisting of ordinary day-to-day objects.' (Gayatri Sinha et al, Expressions & Evocations: Contemporary  Women Artists of India, Mumbai, 1996, p. 70).