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Warli painting is a traditional painting style handed down by the Warli tribe, an indigenous group that lives in the Western Indian state of Maharashtra. Warli painting makes use of a white paint created by dissolving materials such as rice powder into water and natural adhesives to portray images on reddish brown backgrounds of walls or fabric.
These paintings combine basic geometric shapes (circles, triangles, and quadrilaterals) based on perceptions of nature to depict people and architectural structures, while also capturing the characteristics of various plant and animal species and expressing them in a simple, yet extremely vibrant fashion.
The overarching theme of Warli painting centers on a worldview in which the people’s religion and everyday lives become one, and these works display such scenes as rituals worshipping the goddess of fertility, hunting and farming, and even brief moments in the busy lives of everyday people. The Tarpa dance, a traditional ring dance performed during the harvest festival and other events, is often depicted in Warli painting, and such works are renowned for their pulsating circular and spiral compositions.
In addition, Warli painting also expresses the passage of time through its dynamic placement of people, and it often juxtaposes reality with mythological worlds and dreamscapes in the same picture. These works make use of movement and spatial arrangements to depict unique worlds that combine reality and fantasy and transcend time and space.