Sandhya Singh is an artist, but a formally educated one, and so she has a trained, disciplined mind. This is an asset, but what one notes, Poring, over her earlier and Present compositions ( oil on canvas ), is her take has on earlier and shastric music. The keys of a sarangi or gitar are her made to play a vital role in their sinuous passage from work to exciting work. The backgrounds to her compsitions lyrically warm, floral, and tenderly green-cum-yellow. So goes her rhythmic imagination, and with which she has formed a fresh genre to delight herself, and as of course the respective wiewer.
In what I call her ‘sonata’ form, for example, the first movement grows from the subject the Indianized exposition into the development section in which the fantasy of the composer-painter unfolds and elaborates them and leads, the Paint through into the final phrase, namely, recapitulation. This is the broad outline within which countless marvellious possibilities of melody, rhythm and varied structural devices are made to exist. The whole canvas is set out in a sequence of bars having a certain numerical value or variation in time, within which the relative proportion of note to note, phrase to phrase, and so forth, may be patterned out, together with all ‘adornment ‘ of harmony, counterpoint and instrumentation.
This pictorial music is however allied to a geometric imagery. The rhythmical bases of both music and painting is obvious, except in that in plastic art, the detection of rhythm is more difficult. Nevertheless dhgajis compositions richly partake of rhythm, the very life-line of our lives as of a bee moving across a field, or even railway tracks seemingly unwinding slowly into the horizon. The work then has exciting musical colours. The artist’s success therby lies in this direction. It certainly rises to the condition of music, surelly a divine one.
