Painting Phad Painting

Phad painting is a folk art style of Rajasthan that extols the virtues of Pabuji, a king of great valour.

The Pabuji-ka-phad tradition combines a painted backdrop by a Phad artist that depicts scenes from Pabuji’s great victories and pursuits, and a small stage for singers and musicians to tell these tales to village audiences as a form of popular and inspirational entertainment.

Prakash Joshi, a Phad artist with a fine brush, was already adept at innovation. His skills have been put to use combining scripted Devanagari phrases with snippets of the Pabuji story in images of forts, horses and portraits of kings and queens. These have been done on paintings as well as on three-dimensional objects. He has illustrated storybooks for children, and can translate any story into pictorial form.

His work is a soft, mellow combination of just three colours – orange, red and blue, against a backdrop of fine line drawings in black. The work has been executed on a milky-white silk cloth, backed with fine cotton cloth pasted carefully by hand, to give body to the silk. Most Pabuji-ka-phads are a combination of brilliant reds, yellows, blues, greens and strong black. The colours are vivid and the effect striking. By toning down the colours to a softer range, and using these colours only occasionally and judiciously, the Phad art form achieves a high degree of contemporary sophistication.

Calligraphy and script are combined for the first time to contrast the contemporary - with use of letters on trees and water - with the traditional, in which the Hanuman Chalisa is written in Devanagari as an invocation to Hanuman, the fiercely loyal vanara disciple of Rama and his queen Sita.