Foyer Wall Art

Foyer — 7 museum-grade prints sized and toned for the room. 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 or thin brush onto a geru (red-ochre) earth ground. Lakshmi-charan — the goddess's footprints stepping inward from the threshold toward the shrine — is among the most common Diwali motifs, an invitation for prosperity to enter the home. Dvarapalas — the gate guardians who stand in pairs at the entrance of a temple sanctum or gopuram — are a fixed part of South Indian temple iconography, often shown fierce-faced and clubbed, mirrored on left and right of the doorway. Here they are painted in 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, the makara-toranam arch and the school's elongated lotus-shaped eyes.

Updated 22 Jun 2026