ARPITA SINGH, CELEBRATED ARTIST WHO PAINTED REAL WOMEN, DIES AT 89
Some critics dubbed her the female M F Husain while others saw echoes of Marc Chagall in her gravity-defying figures. But neither comparison does justice to the distinctive visual language of Arpita Singh, a pioneering post-Independence artist who died in Delhi on Monday at the age of 89.She looked like the friendly aunty next door, but her canvases were another matter. In one famous painting titled Devi Pistol Wali, a many-armed Durga holds a saree pallu, flowers and fruit, while another hand aims a revolver. My Lily Pond’s serenity is shattered by toy soldiers. Across her canvases, the macabre and the mundane, fantasy and reality, share space.
When this reporter met her at a Vadehra Art Gallery show some years ago, she had been poring over old maps and architectural drawings, studying the stars and solving crosswords. “I gather things on canvas. When I finish gathering, I start painting,” she said. She could not predict what would end up in a work. “They take a shape of their own.” Her paintings often feel like riddles, asking the viewer to follow her cryptic clues and come to their own answers. She disliked explaining her own art. “There should be a difference between what the viewer sees and what the artist paints.”Asked why her women were often middle-aged, unvarnished and un-eroticised, Singh’s answer was plain: “I don’t decide in advance whether the woman is going to be thin or fat, pretty or ugly. Anyway, glamorous women with hourglass shapes are for film and television. I paint real women.”
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