A Folktale of Countryside Painting

Born and raised in a baronial family in North Bengal, Amar Singha was fortunate to be thrust into a world of creativity at an early age, where colored pencils, crayons, and drawing sheets offered great solace from the kind of loneliness that accompanies stately culture. The flash of royalty that made up the world around him fostered his curiosity for deeper exploration, which he began to discover as soon as his pencils and crayons hit the paper. What was considered child’s play at that age catapulted him on a lifelong journey in search of greater truths, freedoms, and simple joys. Along the way, Singha picked up credentials from the Academy of Creative Art in Kolkata. In his final year of art school, he lost his father, which further flung him into the depths of an interior search—one that can best be described (insufficiently so) as a deep dive into the spiritual realm, an exploration into impermanence activated by those questions of life and death that plague us all. For about 16 years Singha essentially disappeared from public life in order to listen closely for whispers of truth and emerged again using paints and brushes to translate the untranslatable through his art which he births in his home studio in Raghunathganj, a small village in West Bengal. STATEMENT - Light and shadow. East and West. A conversation between ancestral Indian lineages and the synthetic cubists. Musical improvisations in oil, acrylic, and watercolor. A harmonic of movement. These are the intersections from which my inner worlds come to life on the canvas. With guidance from an unbroken lineage of ancestors – the master painters of India – I pick up transmissions that my brushes aspire to translate in the present. Swept by intuition I feel into the torment, joy, and blossoming aspirations of the world around me and press the darkness and brilliance of it all into abstraction in order to refract new light, new tones sounded through shape and color – in hopes of delivering a glimpse into that place where an infinity of song and dance can be traced back to, through color and form. For me, this work is a devotion to freedom, the real kind. For my collectors, I’m told my pieces, delivered in an abstract modern medium, offer an un-describable quietude, a sense of union with all things.