Recently, to help the artistes and give their art a platform, the Odisha Lalit Kala Akademi stepped in, encouraging them to paint their walls and lanes with murals. Each household was given Rs 10,000 by the Chief Minister for the job. The walls of the village are now adorned with intricate Pattachitra exhibits depicting the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Krishna Leela, Jaganath Darshan, apart from myriad gods and goddesses. “The idea was to encourage artistes who have been going through a rough time. We generally conduct workshops for the artistes but due to the lockdown we have not been able to do so,” says Akademi president Sudarshan Pattnaik. Some have also started helping the artists reach online buyers through social media. Artistes like Apindra Swain, 47, have taken inspiration from Covid-19, depicting social distancing norms and masks in works.

“The evil is around and there is only one person for the job and it’s YOU.” The message on the walls beside the toll plaza at Shamshabad, near the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad, is hard to miss. Anxious faces, young and old, men, women, and children, all in grayscale, stare back at the passersby, but from behind a blue surgical mask. When three art enthusiasts in Hyderabad decided to use their craft to create awareness amidst a raging pandemic, they knew the task was challenging. “The concept was to depict the seriousness of the pandemic and the fight against it. The art had to convey the message while not distract the drivers. It was not possible on busy streets but the walls near the toll plaza were ideal,” says 26-year-old Vinay Cheguri, who works as an IT analyst for a multinational software giant. “The challenge was to draw expressive faces that were mostly behind a mask. The eyes had to convey the message. We wanted to show everyone is in the same fight against the virus,” adds Uppara Sreedhar, a postgraduate in Fine Arts and one of Cheguri’s partners. Both of them credit their third partner Ram for the impact on the audience.

A painting by Amrita Sher-Gil, In the Ladies’ Enclosure (1938), fetched Rs 37.8 crore (USD 5.14 million) at auction house Saffronart’s sale in Mumbai on Tuesday. This is the highest achieved by the artist in an auction, and the second-most expensive artwork by an Indian. V S Gaitonde’s Untitled (1961), sold for Rs 39.98 crore in March this year at Saffronart, remains the most expensive by an Indian artist. The previous record for Sher-Gil was Rs 18.7 crore for The Little Girl in Blue (1934) at Sotheby’s auction in Mumbai in 2018, according to art market intelligence firm Artery India. Sher-Gil is India’s most famous woman artist and recognised by the Indian government as a “National Treasure”, an honour which makes it illegal to take her art out of the country. The Indo-Hungarian artist died in 1941 at the age of 28. The Indian Express, 14th July,21 “The challenge was to draw expressive faces that were mostly behind a mask. The eyes had to convey the message. We wanted to show everyone is in the same fight against the virus,” adds Uppara Sreedhar, a postgraduate in Fine Arts and one of Cheguri’s partners. Both of them credit their third partner Ram for the impact on the audience.

Archaeologists have discovered cave paintings in a rocky and forested corner of Haryana, not far from the national capital, that they believe belong to the Upper Palaeolithic age, which could potentially make them one of the oldest cave arts in the country. The caves are nestled amid a maze of quartzite rocks in the Aravalli mountain ranges, just outside the national capital, and a stone’s throw from the region’s only surviving patch of primary forest, a holy grove called Mangar Bani. While the residents of Manger village, and adjoining villages such as Selakhari, say generations have been aware of the paintings, it is only recently that the Haryana government’s museum and archaeology department took note of them. It sent a fact-finding team to the area in the last week of June. “So far, cave paintings in Delhi-NCR have only been found here. Most pre-historic sites have been traced in the Aravalli region. The paintings are yet to be dated but at least some of them belong to the Upper Palaeolithic period in all likelihood. We are viewing the paintings in continuation with the Soanian culture which has been found in Shivalik hills, Narmada and Aravallis,” said Banani Bhattacharyya, deputy director of the department of archaeology and museums.

Recently, to help the artistes and give their art a platform, the Odisha Lalit Kala Akademi stepped in, encouraging them to paint their walls and lanes with murals. Each household was given Rs 10,000 by the Chief Minister for the job. The walls of the village are now adorned with intricate Pattachitra exhibits depicting the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Krishna Leela, Jaganath Darshan, apart from myriad gods and goddesses. “The idea was to encourage artistes who have been going through a rough time. We generally conduct workshops for the artistes but due to the lockdown we have not been able to do so,” says Akademi president Sudarshan Pattnaik. Some have also started helping the artists reach online buyers through social media. Artistes like Apindra Swain, 47, have taken inspiration from Covid-19, depicting social distancing norms and masks in works.

“The evil is around and there is only one person for the job and it’s YOU.” The message on the walls beside the toll plaza at Shamshabad, near the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad, is hard to miss. Anxious faces, young and old, men, women, and children, all in grayscale, stare back at the passersby, but from behind a blue surgical mask. When three art enthusiasts in Hyderabad decided to use their craft to create awareness amidst a raging pandemic, they knew the task was challenging. “The concept was to depict the seriousness of the pandemic and the fight against it. The art had to convey the message while not distract the drivers. It was not possible on busy streets but the walls near the toll plaza were ideal,” says 26-year-old Vinay Cheguri, who works as an IT analyst for a multinational software giant. “The challenge was to draw expressive faces that were mostly behind a mask. The eyes had to convey the message. We wanted to show everyone is in the same fight against the virus,” adds Uppara Sreedhar, a postgraduate in Fine Arts and one of Cheguri’s partners. Both of them credit their third partner Ram for the impact on the audience.