Warli on a bulletin board

Replicas of Andy Warhol’s iconic portraits and Raja Ravi Verma’s classic kitschy art are easily available with the street vendors and priced at budgetary levels. Wall hangings,key chains and little show pieces of Madhubani and Warli art are the staples of handicraft exhibitions. Clamouring for opportunities to display them are students and other young patrons with an appetite for art . Twenty-four-year-old Namita Shah is one such shopper. “I would not want to put up something that is very expensive and get bored of it soon. I would rather have a piece that appeals to me and is made differently from the usual. I cannot claim to have the knowledge of any classic artist’s works,but I get what I like,” says Shah. Shah plans to open a store that would cater to art lovers like her.

Mumbai-based media professional Anuradha Bose livened up her hostel room in a top journalism college in Chennai last year by making sure what she loved was up on the walls. “We would print out photographs of bands that we liked,and put them up. A tech savvy friend was awesome at photoshopping,and he would make illustrations or cartoons of bands and so on for me that would also go up on the wall,” Bose says.

As people like Bose invariably show,expressing one’s appreciation for an art form needn’t be stifled by finances. If you admire it,you will find an economical way to have it within your eye-shot. As standard XII student Pallavi Ram from Delhi would tell you,basking in the glow of Starry Starry Night ,“My brother is an admirer of Van Gogh,so he got a printout of this famous painting and framed it. Once,we even cut out a picture of ‘Bharatmata’ by M F Hussain when it appeared in one of the newspapers and put it up on the wall,” recounts Ram. She even gets black and white prints of Madhubani,fills colours into them and gets them printed onto colourful paper. “I even do my own art work,a bit of Warli painting for my bulletin board,” she laughs.

Media professional Karthik Ahuja is an avid lover of classical Indian music. Not a surprise then,that a caricature of the Late Pandit Bhimsen Joshi,picked up at last year’s Baaja Gaaja festival,rules in his “little cabin-fever-inducing space” in Pune. “Waiting to be put up are also a couple of oil paintings that I picked at a beach in Port Elizabeth,a place full of chaps selling you paintings on the sidewalk. I’ve also been thinking of printing some of the photographs I’ve taken over time,and putting those on the wall,” Ahuja says. In true filmy style,he had also sent a poster of Kashmir ki Kali to his retro-films loving parents on their wedding anniversary,hoping it would crawl up their wall.