Arpana Caur: One with art

Her art works have won numerous awards, in India and overseas. But artist Arpana Caur is as unassuming as she can be, in spite of the numerous accolades spanning a career of more than three decades.

A painter, Arpana, has also created beautiful murals, different forms of public art, etchings and the likes. The artist, who a decade earlier, had painted five walls in Bangalore at the behest of top cop Jija Hari Singh, was in the city as part of the Art Bengaluru festival.

A literature student, Arpana, says she had never really planned upon an art career. Painting was something she did on the side, while she was preparing to pursue a stable career like teaching.

Brought up by her mother, who was a single parent, Arpana remembers her zeal was always to take over the duties of running the household from her mother, than dream of a life filled with colours and canvases.

Her artworks, which are now displayed in leading museums of the world including the Hiroshima Museum of Modern Art, Japan, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Ethnographic Museum, Stockholm, among some international venues and the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi and other centers in India, speak a language of compassion, the role of time in our lives, the violence of man on man and conserving environment among others.

Arpana’s work on female-related themes has over the years been spoken about for placing women in an urban content, where the erotic is downplayed by a practical approach. “In my women-related themes, the subject is not identified by her gender,” explains Arpana, adding that being brought up by a working mother, who was a pillar of strength probably led her to depict women with a more real-life approach, rather than just an object of beauty.

The artist, who has also worked on environment-related themes, has recently won a court case along with fellow green enthusiasts to replant 9,000 trees, which were felled during the Commonwealth Games construction activities. Her six-foot bronze structure titled Common Wealth at the first Art Summit held in Delhi, garnered enough attention to the problem of uprooting the green cover of the city and Arpana is only happy that she could evict a response through her art. 

However, in spite of the feat, Arpana says that she harbours no illusions about the power and reach of the visual art medium. “Visual art has been mostly confined within galleries and in the minds and hearts of connoisseurs or art enthusiasts, unlike that of performing arts, whose reach is higher. It’s only in the last decade that there is more interest in the visual art medium,” she says.