Nursery Wall Art

Nursery — 22 museum-grade prints sized and toned for the room. 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. Aipan chowkis are seat-diagrams drawn for life-rites: a naamkaran chowki is laid for a child's naming ceremony, with footprints and auspicious marks invoking protection and welcome into the household. DESIGN BRIEF: the brief was the tree of life as the whole panel, so a single great tree rises from the foot and spreads its rounded boughs to fill most of the field, perched birds and a pair of peacocks at the crown, climbers threading the branches. We held the fill to medium and kept the fish-net frame open rather than a packed mesh, letting clear brick-red ground show through the gaps in the boughs so the tree breathes and the birds and climbers stay legible. 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