Arpita Singh: in the solitude of her studio

Photographs by Rohit Chawla; text by Kishore Singh Arpita Singh paints in a park-facing, light-filled room that she has sectioned off with a row of book-filled shelves, separating it from the rest of the apartment’s living areas in Nizamuddin East.

Not many know that she is a voracious reader — “everything from William Dalrymple to Namita Devidayal” — and isn’t easily scared by their voluminousness, just as large paintings don’t put her off, even though arthritis sometimes makes it difficult for her to squeeze the paint from paint tubes that have hardened.

Sometimes, she’ll call her husband on his phone in his studio across the wall to ask him to help her. At other times, their driver will be summoned for help. “He scolds me that I haven’t yet finished a painting even though it’s been so many days.” In this, her new studio in a new apartment in the same neighbourhood to which the artist couple shifted a year earlier, Arpita’s work has changed, taken up almost entirely by words.

The figure has been obliterated, replaced by letters. When she couldn’t find her earlier sketches, she started making new drawings. These consisted almost completely of words, snatches of lines or phrases that she liked and wrote down in a diary: ‘if only you knew’; ‘road to nowhere’; ‘become something else’… A highly regarded artist, she combines the anxieties of a woman’s interior world with humankind’s existential threats, quite literally the guns and roses of everything from patriarchy to threats of terrorism and violence.

Her drawings are dense, appearing like redacted sections of a proofreader’s text. The paintings, contrarily, are saturated with colour. Emotionally, though, they fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in a nervous world continuously mired by fear of the other.

For someone whose work reflects the apprehensive, Arpita feels freest in her studio, a place where she lets her guard down so her viewers can put theirs up. In this, the autumn of her career, she paints to keep darkness and loneliness in abeyance.

“When I work, I feel free,” she says. “My paintings involve procedure, and procedure keeps me occupied.” The studio then, is her place of solace. Co-published by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Mapin Publishing “She was a painter’s painter and inhabited a world of her own.

It was the visualising in her practice that allowed us voyeurs to get a glimpse of this pictorial space that she spoke with.”Sharan ApparaoFounder of Apparao Galleries The writer is an artist whose lens has captured the pulse of contemporary India.