Bio

Amrita Singhal is based in Berkeley, California. She had the good fortune to study drawing and art history with the brilliant and reclusive painter Louise Smith who was a contemporary of the Bay Area Abstract Expressionists (Diebenkorn, Park, Bischoff et al.) and a one time student of Hans Hoffman, Erle Loran and Margaret Peterson O’Hagan. Two of Amrita’s paintings are in the permanent collection of the UC Berkeley Art Museum (BAM). She has painted a Berkeley Public Works Art mural for Meyer Sound and regularly exhibits her work in solo and juried group shows. Amrita is currently producing one of her painting series in virtual reality and as an immersive exhibit.

Statement

My childhood and adolescence in India have played a decisive role in my life as a painter. I grew up in in a beautiful city with gardens, rivers and architecture from earlier centuries and my daily life as a child was saturated with vast doses of the natural world and Indian mythology. I emigrated to the US as a teenager and eventually became a lawyer. However, once I discovered oil painting and printmaking, there was no turning back.

My work explores being human within a wide ecosystem of many species. Color, texture and the mysteries of paint allow me to inhabit this infinite ecology through themes of nature, beauty, loss, alienation and spirituality.  Painting is the primary medium through which I communicate; however, my creative life is opportunistic across myriad platforms and goes where it will. In addition to painting and printmaking in different mediums, I have painted a City of Berkeley mural and am currently creating a show in virtual reality for museums and galleries, with the final goal of producing it as an immersive for the wider public. All my work draws inspiration from music and art history from around the world which I use freely to explore the universal in being human. I am also drawn to the literature and art of ancient and diverse cultures (Vedic, Egyptian, Greek, Roman etc.) for an understanding of contemporary experience. My goal as an artist is to experience and express the poetic, inchoate and eternal.