Notes on Culture & Antique Art, Ethnic Decor & Vintage Fashion | Wovensouls Art Gallery
The original idea was to use the cow dung walls of homes as the medium to paint on using white pigment made of rice & gum.
Then at some point to make it transportable cloth pieces came to be used and to provide the dark contrasting background, a thin layer of cow dung was applied to the cloth as base.
And then the art flowed….using a chewed bamboo stick as a paint brush.
Over a dozen village scenes – bonfires, threshing, ploughing and harvest dances scenes have been rendered in the typical style of Warli tribals.
Scene of a village feast – barbecue
Nowadays dung has now been substituted with natural red clay base or even mere earth-colored paint. Further, in current day paintings, we see just one scene or two or a repetition of Warli motifs. In this piece I was able to count groups set in over one dozen different scenes.
More images on wovensouls.com
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Surprisingly, the same iconic style is also seen at the eastern end of the country in Orissa:
Wall panels from ODisha:
How did this migration of memes across roughly 1500 km come about?
No idea – will explore this mystery soon.
jm
may 2016
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I have learnt so much from your art notes. thanks for the good work.
The work is Beautiful n so picture perfect …. I wanted to knw if warli is painted on cow dung layer will it chip off after years ?
I’ve had it for over 10 years but it hasn’t shown any signs of crackling / chipping. They probably add something to it to make it durable.