For those who had the privilege of knowing the artist and her profound body of work, the departure of Arpita Singh — much loved, deeply admired — is inevitably a forfeiture of the belief that her indomitable will and mental strength would win the wager against mortality and bodily frailty. And that the defining word would become “legacy”. Coming to terms with that is to rejoice in the abundance of wealth that Arpita poured into her oeuvre. The affluence of pictorial and intellectual resources poured into a long working life would take an account we have no space for here.

Devising out of a pervasive language of abstraction, Arpita, by the 1970s, had developed a consummate body of works, mostly in black and white. A stint at the Weavers Service Centre in Calcutta must have honed her sensitivity to colour, surface, pattern, and to the repetitive, through the grammar of weaving, and telling.…