Title : We Are Family - 1
Artist : Bhuri Bai
Size : 15" x 21.5"
Medium : Posterpaints on paper
Year : 2021
PadmaShri awardee Bhuri Bai is a Bhil artist from Pitol village who is now collected and feted by galleries and museums all over the world.
She was encouraged by J Swaminathan of Bhopal's Bharat Bhavan to start using acrylic colours and paper to make paintings. Before that, she, like other members of her community, would create art on the walls of her home, using colour extracted from plants and clay.
Bhil art is considered by some to be the oldest of India's tribal art forms. It bears similarity to the aboriginal art of Australia in its use of multi-coloured filler dots. Bhuri Bai has contemporarized this folk-art from on colourful canvases depicting man-animal interactions which include planes and cellphones!