India's painted prayers

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The decorative art of India's painted prayers

 

"It is dark, but the glimmer of pre-dawn light touches the eastern

sky. Mari and her young daughter Sita emerge from the doorway of

their mud house. They carry small metal bowls of white powder ground

from parboiled rice. Mari dips an index finger into her bowl and

bends to mark out a grid of white dots beneath her feet. With

movements practiced, fluid and graceful, she paints the curves of

leaves and vines, the loops of petals, and straight edges of stems.

Eight-year-old Sita copies her technique in lines more shaky and

unsure; the two sides of the pattern merge into one. It is a lotus

vine — the symbol of the goddess that protects family and home,

painted to encourage her beneficence and to keep evil from entering

the house. The designs are quickly smudged as the sun rises and

people move in and out of the house."

 

With these words art historian Stephen Huyler introduces his

photographic tour of Indian domestic painting in Painted Prayers:

Women's Art in Village India, a new book published by Rizzoli. Huyler

became interested in these ritual artworks on his first trip to India

in 1971 and has returned every year since to document them. Fifty of

his striking images will be on exhibit at the Smithsonian's Arthur M.

Sackler Gallery from July 23 to April 7, 1996.

 

http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues95/jul95/india_0795

..html

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Abstract of an article by Alison McLean. Originally published in the

July 1995 issue of Smithsonian. All rights reserved.