Colours of Water, Colours of Ground: Pigments, Landscape, and an Ecocritical Approach to Colour in Indian Painting

What colour is water? Exploring this deceptively simple question through Indian manuscripts of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, Prof. Jinah Kim (Harvard University) reveals how artists’ choices of colour encode changing relationships between humans and their environment.

How do you represent water, a shapeless, colourless entity in painting? The artists in pre-colonial India met the challenge of representing water pictorially with various solutions, e.g. through iconographic conventions and through the choice of pigments, which were culturally and period specific. 

The pigment analysis data now available on the 'Mapping Color in History' project can help us see the contours of artistic practices and painterly interventions made in representing water, ground, and nature in pre-colonial Indian art. 

While Indian art with the strong non-mimetic impulse is not known for its landscape tradition, a sustained analytical attention to the representation of water and ground enables ecological readings of colour in pre-colonial Indian painting.

Focusing on select manuscripts of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, this lecture for the monthly Indian Art Circle lecture series demonstrates how colours of water and ground encode environmental awareness and human-nature relationships.

Speaker

Prof. Jinah Kim (Harvard University)

Attendance

This event is open to all.

Image credit: Detail of Asavari Ragini, from a Ragamala, Malpura, Rajasthan, c. 1756. Harvard Art Museums/ Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of Eric Schroeder, 1963.74.