The Gond tribe, one of the famous tribes belonging to the Mandala region of Madhya Pradesh, has a typical style of painting, known as Gond paintings. Painted freehand, these two dimensional paintings reflect their perception of life. The third dimension, the depth is always lacking in these paintings reflecting the simplicity of the artist. Sometimes these paintings also tell how colourful their imagination can be. They put colours to the blandest creations of the nature at times. For example you can see the lizard here in our collection with colouful stripes and dots. They can be treated as the expression of their desire to colour the nature as well, if we think philosophically. The bodies of the various forms that they paint are seldom or perhaps never in one shade, they are always striped, dotted or filled with any other geometrical pattern. They are done on a handmade paper with poster colours. The topics are selected from the natural surroundins or just from the happenings of their day to day lives. The harvest, a field, a happy family, almost everything finds an expression on their canvas.
Apart from painting on paper, this tribe Gond engage themselves in wall painting and floor paintings as well. These paintings serve the ritualistic purposes as well as keeps the surroundings harmonious and pure. They are done with the help of white rice paste, ochre or yellow earth colours. Drawn during festivals or rituals connected with seasonal changes, sowing of corps, onset of rains, harvest or on a significant occasion in their families such as birth, puberty, marriage, pregnancy and death, they are symbols drawn afresh each time, in the courtyard, on the threshold and in other spaces in the house.
With a strong sense of colour and shape, this tribe, even with a lack of the third dimension, express their outlook very skillfully on any canvas; a wall, a paper or the ultimate canvas of the universe; the earth. |
