Growing up, my brother and I lived outside of our home country India. Our limited connection to our roots was through Bollywood, something the whole world has come to fall in love with. But we yearned for now – an artistic connection to our motherland. We’ve been exposed to all sorts of Western art styles from Prehistoric Art to Renaissance Art to Modern Pop Art. But we missed out on learning about the rich art history that India has to offer. So we decided to explore one of the dying tribal art forms of India – Madhubani. We were in luck since our mom went to Fine Arts College and our aunt is a trained Madhubani artist, which gave us just the right push we needed.
We began to work with these lovely ladies to understand and develop art based on Indian motifs. Our aunt hand painted a series of Madhubani based paintings, which we digitized. It was only a matter of time that we realized the potential of this tribal geometric pattern based art. So we jumped into the next best thing – we illustrated a colouring book! And thanks to Amazon’s Create Space platform, we were able to self-publish our first adult colouring book, Mad for Madhu, using our aunt’s art work as digitized prints. We hope this trend catches on, and we are in some way a part of the revival of an art form which never got its due on the international platform.
We hope to educate people on this traditional style, which is rooted in one of the villages of India where the villagers, to date, adorn their walls with natural pigments using sticks for brushes. Interested to know more? There are many agencies and individuals today that work hard to preserve this age old art form.
Check out this amazing Pinterest board for more inspiration and a better understanding of the art form.