Inside Artist Arpita Singh's Studio Life and Work

Arpita Singh paints in a park-facing, light-filled room in her Nizamuddin East apartment, separated from living areas by a row of book-filled shelves. She is a voracious reader who reads authors ranging from William Dalrymple to Namita Devidayal and is unfazed by voluminous books or large paintings, though arthritis sometimes makes it difficult to squeeze hardened paint tubes. To handle this, she occasionally calls her husband in his studio across the wall or summons their driver for help. The artist couple shifted to this new apartment and studio in the same neighbourhood a year earlier, and in this new space, Arpita's work has changed to be almost entirely taken up by words, replacing the human figure with letters. After losing her earlier sketches, she began making new drawings consisting of words, phrases, and snatches of lines from a diary, such as 'if only you knew', 'road to nowhere', and 'become something else'.

Art and Reflections

Her art combines a woman's interior world anxieties with existential threats like patriarchy, terrorism, and violence, resulting in dense drawings that look like redacted proofreader texts while her paintings remain saturated with colour. Sharan Apparao, founder of Apparao Galleries, noted that she was a painter's painter inhabiting her own world. Roshini Vadehra, founder of Vadehra Art Gallery, described her as a dear friend and constant source of wonder who taught others not to overthink art or life. In the autumn of her career, Arpita paints to keep darkness and loneliness in abeyance, stating that working makes her feel free and occupied with procedure.

Context

Artists often maintain dedicated home studios that reflect their personal habits and creative evolution over decades of practice. Gallery founders and cultural institutions frequently document these private spaces and creative routines to offer insight into an artist's body of work.