Restful Wall Art

Restful — 3 museum-grade prints that set the mood. The kettuvallam — literally a 'boat tied with ropes', built without nails from planks lashed with coir — once carried rice and spices on Kerala's backwaters and now glides tourists through Alappuzha and the Vembanad-Kuttanad waterways under its arched thatch roof. This print sets it inside bhitti chitra, Kerala's temple-mural tradition that flourished roughly from the 16th to 19th century and is still painted today: flat panchavarna pigments (red, yellow, green, black, white over an ochre ground), a bold lamp-black outline and the school's elongated lotus-shaped eyes. Anantashayana — Vishnu reclining on the cosmic serpent Ananta (Shesha) upon the ocean of milk in yoganidra, the cosmic sleep — is one of the central images of Vaishnavism, with Brahma emerging on a lotus from Vishnu's navel to begin a new creation and Lakshmi attending at his feet. The form is enshrined and famous at the Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram. The village well is where Braj cattle gather in the midday heat, the daily rhythm of go-charan (cow-herding) that sits at the heart of Pushtimarg's love of the cow. A pichhwai (literally 'that which hangs at the back') is the painted cloth hung behind the Shrinathji deity to set the scene; cow-register cloths are a beloved secular subject.

Updated 22 Jun 2026