Lal Bahadur Singh: From signboards & political cut-outs to painting human impact on nature

Artist Lal Bahadur Singh (right) and his artworks on show at Gallerie Nvya, Delhi.

Lal Bahadur Singh’s Silent Echoes of a Flight Beyond… and Whispers of the Earth Beneath…, on show at Delhi’s Gallerie Nvya in Saket till May 17, presents a poignant meditation on the fragile coexistence of nature and urbanisation. The newly made 25 works on display offer a visual narrative that oscillates between beauty and loss, adaptation and displacement through meticulously rendered birds, burnished bricks, and evocative landscapes. Tradition meets modernity as the exhibition captures the quiet resilience of life amid encroaching industrialisation — and birds are poignant symbols of resilience, juxtaposing nature against the stark geometry of urbanisation.

Singh is unique in style, approach, and medium. The evocative displays span watercolours on paper, acrylic and oil on canvas — with sizes ranging from 30x40 inches, 54x52 inches and 48x60 inches — and an installation of 6x20 ft.

Very few can turn their childhood passion into profession. The day he started writing is also the day he started drawing — distorted lines. The very first drawing he made, at the age of five, was of a tiger, with a chalk on a slate. Tiger visuals were all around the little boy, most specifically on the calendars hanging on the walls, alongside Goddess Durga. He’d use whatever materials he found around him, including dhul (dust), mitti (sand/earth), kankad, pathar (stones), khadia (chalk or white clay), geru (red ochre), neel (blue colour from the indigo plant) etc. It is both a response to nostalgia and staying connected to his roots that he draws on rural inspiration in his art. The jungles, birds and animals — “I can’t find them in the cities, they remind me of my village, I paint them to amuse myself,” says Singh, 40, who now lives in Faridabad, Haryana, was born into a farming family in Dhanauta in district Ghazipur, near Varanasi, in Uttar Pradesh.

'Unknown Journey', 60x48 inches, Oil on canvas, 2024, by Lal Bahadur Singh. (Image courtesy Gallerie Nvya)

Owing to the family’s financial hardships, Singh could only study till Class IX and then he took up a signboard-painting job at Byahut Art Paint Shop Ghazipur, learning from the well-known Dr Saiyyed Wadood. “I was a helper with him for three years. Stayed at the house of the shop owner Pradeep Byahut, too. I learnt the skills there, writing, painting signboards, making hoardings, cut-outs, banners, posters, portraits, wall paintings, and writing letters. You would remember the hand-painted life-sized cut-outs of politicians back in the day in 1994-95. I used to make those during election season,” says Singh, “I used to get more of these figure cut-out work because I was good at painting.”

Untitled, 54x42 inches, Acrylic on canvas, 2024, by Lal Bahadur Singh. (Image courtesy Gallerie Nvya)

Livelihood concerns brought him to Delhi in 1997. He took up odd painting jobs in the market. “When I came here, I came in contact of Shamsul Islam and Neelima Sharma who run Nishant Natya Manch. Shamsul ji was a professor (political science) at Satyawati College. He told me to complete my education and study further. Then, I studied and completed my schooling in Delhi and took admission at College of Art, Delhi University,” says the artist who, before joining college, for many years, was making commissioned art.

Untitled, 72x48 inches, Acrylic on canvas, 2024, by Lal Bahadur Singh. (Image courtesy Gallerie Nvya)

“There was a time when people used to hang European paintings in their homes. I have made many European paintings. Doing that helped me a lot in bettering my sense of use of colours. If you see the colours in my artwork, you’ll see a European touch in my work. The colour palette is European while everything else in my work will reflect Indianness. The lines and style are inspired from Mughal miniature, Madhubani and Japanese miniature,” he adds.

'Caring for others', 54x42 inches, Acrylic on canvas, 2024, by Lal Bahadur Singh. (Image courtesy Gallerie Nvya)

The trees, birds and animals are a recurring motif in his work. Why so? I ask, as he goes on to reply, “Because I am also a social animal, I started bringing my society into my work. Whatever I was close to, I started drawing that. I lived in the village for many years, I grazed cows and buffaloes. So, I began drawing cows and bulls. In this show, you’ll see birds, sparrows… I used to make them in college, too.”

In his previous works, he’s shown birds perched on a balcony, yapping away, sipping tea, seated on a bed of an apartment, or teaching alphabets to young birds. “I’m presenting my human society through the figures of birds and animals,” he says, “Those birds sitting in balconies of apartments… shows present-day urbanisation, high-rises and gated societies, I tried to make them interestingly, so, that people enjoy it, too, and deeply feel that we humans live this way. It’s not that I am doing it for birds’ conservation or making statements about it consciously. They are also prakiti ke jeev (nature’s creature) and so are we. The only difference is that we humans have developed a lot of things for our own convenience. Call us intelligent creatures or those with developed minds, we too are animals. So, it’s not animals versus human. Nature toh har koi paint karta hai (every Tom, Dick and Harry paints nature), I have also drawn flowers, leaves, landscape, but, at the same time, I have also tried to bring in the sorrows and pains of nature. In two-three works in this show, I have dwelt on an imagined ‘Organic City’ with organic homes — that’s my dream — how do we balance nature alongside the influx of technology or development. How the two can co-exist.”

'Where is my home', 40x30 inches, Oil on canvas, 2024, by Lal Bahadur Singh. (Image courtesy Gallerie Nvya)

A particular work in the current exhibition, birds flying in distress over a hacked bark of a felled tree, their nests destroyed, and the sun in the distance in the backdrop turns red — blood shedding of nature. It has almost a tactile and audio-visual texturality to it, almost re-echoing the shrieks and pained cries of birds, peacocks and animals from a viral video of the recent deforestation drive at Hyderabad’s Kancha Gachibowli forest — to build IT parks for the adjacent University of Hyderabad — until the Supreme Court had to intervene to make it stop.

'Festival', 60x48 inches, oil on canvas, 2025, by Lal Bahadur Singh. (Image courtesy Gallerie Nvya)

Singh is worried about deforestation and pollution, that are increasing not only in India but in the world, too. The impact of urbanisation Singh tackles through his new series of stunning works on show — made with a lot of patience, observation, gravitas, grace, love, care and great attention to detail. Look keenly, the irony of each work leaves you enchanted and enriched. A truck loaded with bricks — almost like a high-rise — with birds hovering around it. Vehicles moving, spiralling upwards, in a peeled apple — signalling roads cut out of mountains. Concrete houses growing like corns on a corn/maize crop plant that birds — parrots and sparrows — are feeding on. Birds nesting and resting in the gaps in between bricks at a brick kiln — reminiscent of humans standing in their balconies of high-rises. Singh’s black birds “Chasing Concrete’s Shine” reminds of Wallace Steven’s poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: “...The blackbird(s) whirled in the autumn winds/It was a small part of the pantomime...”

'Chasing Concrete's Shine', 72x48 inches, Oil on canvas, 2024, by Lal Bahadur Singh. (Image courtesy Gallerie Nvya)

“Cities are made by felling trees, nature has been erased as urbanisation takes over, but gradually nature will reclaim its place where now stands concrete jungles. Somewhere nature will balance itself, but how will we humans balance ourselves, that we will have to think about,” he says, “If you look at Earth from the space, we humans are just like other creepy-crawlies. So, the destruction that we cause to nature, we need to stop and wake up to the reality that tomorrow if nature takes its toll on us, say a tsunami or an earthquake, we will be finished. But nature can’t be finished. It might mutate and transform but it will exist in some form — unlike humans.”

'Organic City', 6x20 feet (72x240inches), Acrylic on canvas, 2025, by Lal Bahadur Singh. (Image courtesy Gallerie Nvya)

Singh is a self-made artist, who’s assimilated training in both the contrasting guru-shishya parampara (mentor-disciple tradition) as well as in an institutional tutelage format at art college, where he learnt how to experiment with different colours and media to create his own style of work. But his foremost teacher and muse remains mother nature. In a previous work, Dharti Maa, a banyan tree juts out of the hump of a cow, which is symbolic of Mother Earth providing shade and shelter to the very rats nibbling at the pearls that have fallen off her. “It is challenging sometimes to conceptualise the work, and get the exact imagery that you have on mind on canvas. It’s important to develop a thought process for it,” he admits.

'City Park', 60x96 inches(diptych), Acrylic on canvas, 2024-25, by Lal Bahadur Singh. (Image courtesy Gallerie Nvya)

Ask him about the bright colours that he uses in his paintings, and pat comes the reply: “you would like your new clothes to look new, right?” (Laughs.)

“Society must reflect in one’s art. The artist’s role, thus, is to hold up art as a mirror to society. And that is why there will always be a story or a message in my work. Of course, there are such works, too, where there is no message,” says the artist and farmer’s son, who’s associated with the Krantikari Mazdoor Morcha Sangathan along with Nishant Natya Manch. “In the current show, there are lot of variations in my work,” he says.

Untitled, 48x120 inches (diptych), Acrylic on canvas, 2024, by Lal Bahadur Singh. (Image courtesy Gallerie Nvya)

Silent Echoes of a Flight Beyond… and Whispers of the Earth Beneath… is on show till May 17, 11 am-7 pm, at Gallerie Nvya, Square One Designer Arcade, Saket, Delhi. Closed on Sundays.