(b.1935, Punjab)
Paramjit Singh had his art education in the School of Arts, Delhi Polytechnic (1953-58). He was the founder member of 'The Unknown', a group of young painters and sculptors based in Delhi. He worked in the Graphic Studios of the Atelier Nord Oslo (1973). He was also a faculty member of the Departments of Fine Arts, JamilaMiliaIslamia, New Delhi (1963-99).
He has had significant exhibitions like Green Thought, Bodhi Art, Singapore (2008), Art Festival, Israel (1994), Art Biennale, Cairo (1994), The Indian Encounters, Galleria, London (1993), International Festival of Art, Baghdad (1988), Festival of India, USSR (1987), Art Biennale, Ankara, Turkey (1986), Inaugural Exhibition, Bharat Bhava, Bhopal (1984), the 15th International Biennale, Tokyo (1984), Indian Art Today, 1Yarmstadt, Germany (1982), Art Expo '70, Indian Pavilion, Osaka, Exhibition of Prints, Atelier Nord and Gallery '71, Tromso, Norway (1973) and First Young Asian Artists Exhibition, Tokyo (1957). Apart from this he has also exhibited extensively in Norway, Germany and Belgium.
Over the years Paramjit Singh's landscapes loaded with silences have become a distinct mystical utterance in pictorial term. In his early works the influence of the French Impressionists is evidently visible in his sun drenched landscapes where every minute detail of the flora and fauna are flooded with a clear and lambent light. Paramjit had devised his own ways of evoking this radiance by often stippling the canvas with contrasting shades of yellow, orange, viridian along with darker tones that imparted a sense of mystery to this golden haze. Flecks of white and lemon yellow enrich the tactile quality of his paintings. From around the late Î80s, Paramjit's landscapes and his techniques changed radically. The influence of the Italian picture metafisica with their sharp shadows and melting tones receded into oblivion, in its place emerged lush Indian landscapes with a distinctly transcendental presence.
In his current oeuvre titled Green Thought, he has created a prelapsarian world where eternal bliss and delicious solitude prevail, a world which has not known human intervention. Yet it is not just a happy, sunny, carefree world where trees, shrubs, hedges and plants animated by the sap of nature burst forth into golden crowns of foliage. Paramjit Singh does paint Ò mostly from memory- leafy arbours and grassy dales and nooks that he encountered in his long walks down the countryside in Punjab, where he is from, Himachal Pradesh and Delhi of yore, verdant and unspoiled by progress. Through contrasting tones, colours and textures he strives to capture certain moods of nature that are close to the tone poems of Debussy, where the march of clouds may be the inspiration but the actual composition as a whole is far too complex to be described as that alone. Thus his paintings are closer to abstraction freed from the limitations of representation.
As an artist he has become more interested in the very act of painting itself, application of pigment and the relationship that variegated tones and shades of pigment bear with each other. He wants to capture the texture of nature, the coarseness of crisp, dry grass and the smoothness of pebbles and translate that into painting. He sees nature's grandeur in such small things and his aim is to use his oil paints and brushes to recreate the sensuous experience of seeing and touching the vision that inhabits his mind's eye thereby turning the entire approach into a more personal statement.
The artist lives and works in New Delhi.