Artist Reena Singh cuts through the history of colour and architecture with her palette knife. Recalling the neat and ordered sectors of the Bokaro Steel City in Jharkhand, where visual artist Reena Singh, spent her childhood, she traces her early love for geometry and architecture. She remembers how early days were spent with her sketchbook sitting outdoors, sketching the buildings and their forms. While both her parents were extremely supportive of her following an artistic career, they did...
Artist Reena Singh cuts through the history of colour and architecture with her palette knife. Recalling the neat and ordered sectors of the Bokaro Steel City in Jharkhand, where visual artist Reena Singh, spent her childhood, she traces her early love for geometry and architecture. She remembers how early days were spent with her sketchbook sitting outdoors, sketching the buildings and their forms. While both her parents were extremely supportive of her following an artistic career, they did not want her to travel away too far at such a young age and Banaras was hence a desired destination for the artist. Hence, she did her Bachelors and Masters at (BHU) Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi.
Reena shares that she was ‘fascinated’ by the lanes and gullies and the disorganized and unplanned nature of the spatial pattern of the city captured her attention much more than the mythological and theological aspects of the Holy City of Varanasi. Even the colours that emerged on her palette, came from an emotional place rather than underwritten with any symbolic meaning. Studying the effects of light on waters of the Ghats was her favourite occupation and it was from those depths of the Ganges that her early non- narrative work emerged.
In 2001, Reena moved to Delhi and while she continued to nurture her earlier influences of Bokaro and Banaras the capital city began to have an effect on her and it reflected in her work. While she has always been aware of her deep spiritual growth, Reena is quite clear that she is more interested in the historical, iconographical and mythological aspect of Shiv-Shakti rather than the religious characteristics of it. The ancient scriptures and their interpretation of complex phenomenon inspired her and she drew from it, especially during the Pandemic, when going out and studying architectural monuments wasn’t possible. She would regulate her studio hours with reading and sketching before she would work on her canvases preparing the ground with the brush and then working on it structurally with a palette knife.
The strength drawn from ancient abstract forms fuelled her approach to abstraction not in a western, modern sense, but rather in Indian historical and mythological context. She began experiments with the many dimensions of abstract and semi abstract paintings. Her strokes, of acrylic paint on canvas applied primarily with a palette knife convey a strong sense of maturity that can be read in her paintings. The forms rise out of a sense of spontaneity that grows out of her personal experiences and memories. For instance, in her work Tattva-2 (Acrylic on Canvas, 2021-22), there is an evocation of architectural forms surrounded by a mist of colours, where the spherical dome of a monument rises above the forms and urban structures of the city, in haze of gold, against a dark sky. The forms are only hinted at and not over defined and this lends them a mystical and poetic quality that conveys an amalgam of her experiences in all three cities but can be traced down to Delhi. In another work (Tattva-6, Acrylic on Canvas, 2021-22) it is the palette of blues, yellows with a splash of red at the centre that constructs her interpretation of the landscape. The conical shapes and the blue colour tend to lend the work, the sensibility of a hill-scape. In some instances, there is no direct evocation of a landscape rather it is the evocation of a feeling. One that is layered; as it slowly reveals itself through vapours of gold and whites, in solid blues, Prussians, turquoise, reds, burgundy, browns and even blacks.
Conclusively, one could say that Reena’s artistic journey is now ready to take on the international art arena, with shows planned for Japan and other Eastern and European destinations that will follow as the art scene opens up internationally with the COVID lockdown slowly lifting as the world recovers from one of its most difficult trials. The dark times are mitigated by the light and that is reflected in Reena’s work that celebrates the verities of shades, colours and forms in its bandwidth that celebrates form, history and emotion.
