The world in miniature

Today I finished my first draft of the City Palace Museum. I was wandering around the last courtyard, the Lakshmi Chowk, and I came across an artist restoring the paintwork on a palanquin to its former glory, with a big bit of license no doubt. He kindly showed me what he was doing. Using powder paint mixed with a bit of sap from the Neem tree as the binding agent.

Painting has a long and noble tradition here. Particularly miniature paintings. There are schools offering art lessons, and shops selling traditional paintings all over town. Today I came across one with a difference. It looks like a good place to send Shannon to learn.

The Mewar School of miniature painting is known for their more expressive style – still quite wooden but definitely less formal. They have an interesting way of leaving their sketched outline on their paper or silk, and then letting colour guide the eye to the action. And there’s usually a fair bit going on in the densely peopled scenes.

Another feature of the Mewar artists is their colour tends to be more vibrant than their contemporaries. Paint is mixed from ground up minerals and vegetables. Ochre, saffron, lapus lazuli, and carbon for black. The very fine work is applied with a brush made of a single hair from a squirrel’s tail. My fading eyesight notwithstanding, the incredible detail this work involves is just awesome, in the most literal sense of the word.

Looking through a magnifying glass, you can see every leaf showing every vein in a spray of foliage. Each one individually coloured, as nature would. No two exactly the same. Some with the tiniest of dragon flies, perfectly rendered, with wings and antennae and not much bigger than 2mm, or so.

The painting on the palanquin obviously doesn't fall into this category, but it has its rightful place in the order of these things.