Affectionate Wall Art

Affectionate — 5 museum-grade prints that set the mood. Aipan is the ritual floor- and wall-art of the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand, drawn traditionally by Kumaoni women with white rice-paste (biswar) applied by fingertip onto a geru (red-ochre) earth ground. Ghughuti is the Kumaoni observance of Makar Sankranti (mid-January), when families make ghughut — small deep-fried flour birds and sweets — string them into garlands, and children wear them and offer them to crows at dawn; paired birds are a recurring auspicious motif. Gond painting comes from the Gond Adivasi communities of central India, with its best-known school formed by the Pradhan Gond of Patangarh and the wider Dindori region of Madhya Pradesh. The contemporary form is largely the legacy of Jangarh Singh Shyam (1962–2001), whose distinctive line-and-in-fill manner — every form bounded by a bold outline, then filled with rows of dots, dashes, commas and scales — became known as Jangarh Kalam and was carried on by his family and students. Pithora is the ritual wall-painting tradition of the Rathwa, Bhil and Bhilala Adivasi communities of Chhota Udepur in eastern Gujarat and the adjoining belt of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The horse is Pithora's mount for the gods; the family motorcycle, the village bus and the tractor are the everyday transport of the same villages today, and contemporary Pithora artists fold such modern life into the wall's flat folk line.

Updated 22 Jun 2026