Creating Art Every Day

Isn’t it terrific that in our way of life, the act of creating art is one of the basic household activities that every single woman indulges in?

Art is too important to be relegated to just professional artists to create …. it is created by every single household!

And so here we see a family making rangoli on the floor using white powder and their fingers! ONLY fingers!!

I’ve done this myself as an assistant to by grandmother in my childhood.

For special festivals like Diwali the rangoli was large.

And on other days a basic rangoli was put. The daily ritual consisted of  washing the threshold with water, dotting it with red kumkum powder – a sign of auspiciousness and then the basic rangoli patterns were created.

The Swastika motif, flowers, birds and basic geometric patterns such as this one were common in my childhood.  Our neighbors from South India made the most amazing geometric repetitive patterns according an algorithm that I’d try to figure out while they made it. At that time I could not find the mathematical formula for replicating those patters but today I can see  that these were the patterns are similar to those used for creating ‘magic squares’.

A picture from the net:

What lovely memories have been evoked!

Jan 2018

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