To Shekhawati By Road

Arpita Singh's free-floating compositions address challenging social and political subject matter, while maintaining an aura of gentle grace and quiet luminosity. Singh spent four years working in the Calcutta and Delhi weavers service center and her paintings draw partly on the stylistic devices of Kantha embroidery. Consuming the entire canvas, sacrificing baseline and perspective for figural relationships and pattern, these works quote the textile tradition of which Arpita Singh was a part. "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 with nature and nurture with the physical world and its history. The woman lying on her side has her ribs exposed and vertebrae exposed. There are other works where the figures have their ribs exposed. This again could be determined by two influencing factors. A year 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."
(Ella Datta, Of History, Context and Location, Picture Postcard, exh. Cat., Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2006)