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Warli Painting of Maharashtra
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The Warlis live in the Dahanu and Talasari talukas of the northern Thane district, parts of Nashik and Dhule districts of Maharashtra, Valsad District of Gujarat, and the union territories of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu.
Warli life is one encompassed in nature, and revolves around the cycle of seasonality. The good times for them begins with the advent of the monsoon. The arrival of the monsoon heralds the season of plenty for the Warlis, as the first crop of paddy becomes a virtual certainty for them.
Despite being in such close proximity with Mumbai, the biggest metropolis of India, Warli tribesmen seem to be far away from the ethos of modern urbanization. It was in the early seventies that the Warli Art was first discovered. The origins of this art can be traced to as early
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as the 10th century.
Warli Art is the vivid expression of daily and social events and is embellished on the walls of village houses. The paintings depict the daily routine of the Warlis, with some of the fertility gods. The characters in the Warli painting are usually dancing, with hands in hands in a circular manner. The central motif in these ritual paintings is surrounded by scenes portraying hunting, fishing and farming, festivals and dances, trees and animals. The themes are highly repetitive and symbolic.
Warli Paintings employ a very basic graphic vocabulary: a circle, a triangle and a square. The circle represents the sun and the moon, the triangle is derived from mountains and pointed trees and the square determines the sacred enclosure or a piece of land. This becomes the central motive in each ritual painting, and is called the "chauk" or "chaukat", enclosing the Palaghata, the mother goddess, symbolizing fertility.
Human and animal bodies are represented by two triangles joined at the tip; the upper triangle depicts the trunk and the lower triangle the pelvis. Their precarious equilibrium symbolizes the balance of the universe, and of the couple, and has the practical and amusing advantage of animating the bodies.
The Warli art is an ingenious example of man-environment interaction. Of course, the painting has now moved on to paper and is put up on T Shirts, Dupattas, Saris, et al.
Images sourced from Google Search Engine with the term "Warli Painting" |
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