Fourteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Making folk paintings is a treasured part of cultural heritage and an important form of expression of creativity of through generations. This paper is a reflection on the development of folk paintings in regions of India in the past decade, when production was patronised by public and private organisations. Whilst folk arts are an important emblem of the peoples and cultural expression of the world, these are still largely considered minor arts. Famous Indian painter and writer K. G. Subramanyan defended the importance and understanding of these in the anthropological and social sense, also placing value on uniquely aesthetic nature of them. We do the exploration with a focus on traditional decorative patterns and iconography, striking colors, and symbolic motifs that enliven folk traditions such as Gond of Central India, Mithila of North and Pattachitra of Eastern regions. We explore the specific relationships between the current resurgence of the Indian folk paintings and matters of representation and communication. We guage these relationships in the recent history of Indian folk painting. We then focus in more detail at the contemporary folk paintings, which can largely be looked at in intersecting functions: representative and receptacle of traditional aesthetics; conveyor of social and moral mores; mode of communication; and means of engagement. Following a brief discussions of recent case studies – vivid examples of contemporary folk paintings – we propose that modern folk art inculcates reconciliation of the apparently contradictory elements of tradition, pure aesthetics, and professional commerce.