The Horses

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This curious rendering of horses on a silk cloth-piece pasted on canvas is characteristic art-form of Orissa art born of centuries old tradition of textile painting. Using just black and gold for his main design and maroon for border, the artist has experimented, and with tremendous success, to create his visual world, so full of movement, rhythm and formative variety, and all by repeatedly using just the single motif of horse. He has painted as many as twenty-six horses, each with its own form, curves, pace and posture creating its own music and rhythm, sense of movement and energy flow and own kind of visual effect. Different from a block-printed textile repeating the same designing pattern over and again, this textile is a unique art-piece revealing its theme inside out. It portrays each horse not as a mere form but also as an intrinsic being, a living personality charged by its ego to outdo others and to hold its robust head high.

The approach of the artist is realistic. His horses are not an abstract thing. He seems to move from real to abstract. His theme is not thus the depiction of a plain form. He seems to aim at creating the sense of movement, charging of energy, variety of posture, figurative grace, majesty and robustness and the rhythm and visual effect which they conjointly create. He displays a rare ingenuity in creating all this by using a single motif. Even in rendering his border he has not gone beyond this form and beyond the general colour scheme. He has laid the border using the same black and gold and by artistically repeating the tail motif of his horse. The two colour schemes, where one is black, usually create line drawings, or shaded pencil sketches, but strangely just with black and gold, of which gold is not appropriate for shading, the artist has rendered this rare painting.

Horse has been man's passion in all ages and in all lands from primitive days to the recent day. He has craved to possess a horse for status as well as for transport, riding and sporting. Mythologies have woven around horses many of their legends and histories have celebrated, along their heroes, a number of horses. The world is not without monuments dedicated to horses. Horse has been more significant in ancient and medieval wars than weapons they were fought with. In concurrent security set-ups, consisting of police and security forces, the significance of horse is nonetheless same. Horse has been one of the earliest commodities man has traded with and exported and imported globally for trade. Horse has been and is still the means of measuring strength and defines energy and power. Horse has been the theme of art from the day man learnt drawing lines and forms. Rock-shelter paintings of the earliest days reveal horse drawings including human figures riding them. Earliest murals, such as those at Ajanta and Bagh caves in India and Vetican City in Rome, are not without the images of horse. From Renaissance artists Michaelangelo, Raphael and Rambrant to the contemporary Indian artist Hussain there shall hardly be anyone who has not resorted to paint a horse. If horse, elephant and parrot are excluded, there would hardly remain anything in folk art traditions. Horse is the most photographed animal and the best seller in posters and wall papers. Horse is as much popular in sculptures, metal casts, stuccoes, textiles, embroidery and other art forms.

This description by Prof. P.C. Jain and Dr Daljeet. Prof. Jain specializes on the aesthetics of ancient Indian literature. Dr Daljeet is the chief curator of the Visual Arts Gallery at the National Museum of India, New Delhi. They have both collaborated on numerous books on Indian art and culture.

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