“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt,” Leonardo da Vinci once said.
These words hit harder as the Indian artistic community and art connoisseurs mourn the death of celebrated painter Arpita Singh, who died at the age of 89 in New Delhi on Monday.
Arpita Singh’s colour-saturated canvases often depicted women’s lives. Although her style of painting evolved over her more than six-decade career, from monochromatic artworks to Bengali folktale-based compositions, each piece had the ability to leave spectators in awe while stirring a whirlpool of emotions within them.
In February 2026, Arpita Singh won the News Masterstroke Art Awards’ Artist of the Year award.
Arpita Singh’s Life And Career
Born in present-day Bangladesh in 1937, Arpita Singh graduated from Delhi Polytechnic in 1959 and worked with the Cottage Industries Restoration Programme. In 1962, she married artist Paramjit Singh. The couple had a daughter, Anjum Singh, who was also a painter and died in November 2020 at the age of 53 following a cancer battle.
After working in the textile industry, Arpita Singh’s work carried glimpses of her experience of working with traditional artists and weavers across India. She was also a founding member of The Unknown, an artists’ group.
Arpita Singh’s first exhibition was organised at Kunika-Chemould Gallery in 1972 in New Delhi. Her artworks have been showcased at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Paris, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, and Geneva. Her work has also been showcased throughout India.
Arpita Singh painted women surrounded by teapots, flowers, trees, animals, flags, vases, festoons, and pillows. Photo: Rohit Chawla
Arpita Singh’s Style Of Work And Art
In Portrait Of An Artistphotographer Rohit Chawla captured the painter in her apartment in Nizamuddin East, New Delhi.
Published in January 2026, the book mentioned that Arpita Singh had arthritis, making it difficult for her at times to squeeze paint out of tubes. She was also a “voracious” reader who was never intimidated by the breadth of books, from William Dalrymple to Namita Devidayal.
Highlighting her work, an excerpt in the book read: “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, by contrast, are saturated with colour. Emotionally, though, they fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in a nervous world continuously mired in fear of the other.”
Arpita Singh’s early paintings were watercolours on paper, created using black and white ink. In the 1980s, her work was inspired by Bengali folklore and focused on women. This is when vibrant colours started infusing life into her canvases. Women were depicted living their daily lives and carrying out everyday chores.
Arpita Singh painted women surrounded by teapots, flowers, trees, animals, flags, vases, festoons, and pillows. Her most famous paintings included My Mother, Wish Dream, Munna Appa’s Garden, 31 Days Of December, Women with Boats and Ducks, Entering the Courtyard, The Golden Deer, and The Ritual.
Her exhibitions around the world not only brought her fame but also earned her numerous awards and accolades. She received the Parishad Samman in 1991, the Kalidas Samman in 1998-99, and the Padma Bhushan in 2011.