Painting
The earliest Indian paintings were the rock paintings of pre-historic times, the petroglyphs as found in places like Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka, and some of them are older than 5500 BC. Such works continued and after several millennia, in the 7th century, carved pillars of Ellora, Maharashtra state present a fine example of Indian paintings, and the colors, mostly various shades of red and orange, were derived from minerals. Thereafter, frescoes of Ajanta and Ellora caves appeared. India's Buddhist literature is replete with examples of texts which describe that palaces of kings and aristocratic class were embellished with paintings, but they have not survived. But, it is believed that some form of art painting was practiced in that time.
Indian Art was given a new lease of life by the British in early 19th century when the new government required painters to document Indian life and times. The English School paintings, as these new art were called had seen the emergence of India's greatest artists of all times Raja Ravi Verma. Other important artists of the Colonial period include Jamini Roy, Amrita Shergil, Ramkinker Baij and Rabindranath Tagore. After independence, Indian art became more diverse and artists like Maqbool Fida Hussain, Francis Newton Souza, Subodh Gupta, Devajyoti Ray, Paresh Maity and Bose Krishnamachari earned international recognition.
- Indian art, ancient and medieval
Read more about this topic: Arts And Entertainment In India
Famous quotes containing the word painting:
“A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it—a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand—as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it is bad art.”
—Marc Chagall (1889–1985)
“This is the essential distinction—even opposition—between the painting and the film: the painting is composed subjectively, the film objectively. However highly we rate the function of the scenario writer—in actual practice it is rated very low—we must recognize that the film is not transposed directly and freely from the mind by means of a docile medium like paint, but must be cut piece-meal out of the lumbering material of the actual visible world.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)