Artist : Swarna Chitrakar
Title : Village girl with deer Medium : Powder pigments on paper with cloth backing
Size : 7” x 22”
Year : 2025
“Patta” literally means “cloth” and “chitra” means “picture” in Sanskrit. The materials used are all indigenous and inexpensive, coming from vegetable, earth, and mineral sources. Conch shells, crushed, boiled and filtered, are used for white, black comes from lamp soot, red from ‘hingulal’ stone, green comes from plants and blue from indigo. These extracts are then cooked with the gum from the ‘kaintha’ (elephant apple) fruit tree and applied. The scrolls are unfurled with a story, usually sung. Themes include popular Hindu deities, epic and Puranic anecdotes, folktales and myths, incidents of daily life, and the flora and fauna of their environment.
Swarna Chitrakar is an award-winning artist who has travelled abroad innumerable times to present her art and her songs. She has mastered the Kalighat style of painting and combined it with the Midnapore medium to produce enchanting works with a touch of the contemporary, giving her works a special universal appeal.