Grounded Wall Art

Grounded — 105 museum-grade prints that set the mood. Aipan is the ritual floor- and wall-art of the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand, made traditionally by Kumaoni women with white rice-paste (biswar) drawn by fingertip onto a geru — red-ochre earth — ground, most often at thresholds, courtyards and household shrines before festivals and life-rites. The strictly two-tone white-on-geru discipline is the heart of the form and distinguishes it from multicolour Mithila/Madhubani work. DESIGN BRIEF: the brief was the moment after the cut, so the hero is a large oval medallion holding the threshing floor itself — pairs of yoked oxen walking a circle over the grain while figures drive them and toss it with winnowing forks — and the rest of the harvest stacks in bands above and below. We held the fill to medium and kept the fish-net frame open rather than a packed mesh, with clear oxblood ground around the oval so the oxen, the sheaves and the winnowing read at a glance. Kalighat Pat grew up in 19th-century Kolkata, painted by migrant patua (chitrakar) scroll-painters who settled near the Kalighat Kali temple and sold quick watercolour souvenirs to pilgrims. Working on mill-made paper with a bold single black brush outline and soft 'boneless' shaded strokes on a plain ground, they painted gods and goddesses alongside what is often called India's first modern social satire — sharp, affectionate caricatures of the colonial 'babu' and the hypocrisies of Calcutta life.

Updated 22 Jun 2026