About

Discovering Madhubani

I am Egle Singh from Lithuania. I came to live in India in 2009 with my Indian husband and our daughter. There were many things that were different and things that interested me. One of those things was Madhubani art. I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it.  It was so colorful, so Indian, so simple and so perfect. It contained everything that a perfect artwork can contain: purity, warmth and nature. Madhubani painting has the same effect as a child's drawing has. It has the ability to interpret the world in the two dimensional plane, using bold colors, lines and loads of symbols.

Madhubani paintings on sail at the Delhi Hath

Learning About Madhubani

Looking at these paintings was not only a pleasure but a torture as well. I was unable to draw them myself. I didn't understand the stories in them, I didn't recognize their characters, I didn't know what medium they used, I didn't know Madhubani was a name of the village in Bihar, I didn't know how to put the lines and shapes together so that it could transform into something this brilliant. I do not know that now too. However I did the following in effort to learn more about it:

* Reading everything on Madhubani I could find;

* Keep coming to the neighbor's house to look at the Madhubani paintings;

* Collecting Madhubani images on my computer;

* Meeting with Madhubani villagers in Delhi and asking them about their village;

* Buying some paintings at the Delhi Hath and asking the artists everything I could about Madhubani;

* Copying the paintings I really liked in order to better understand the artist's perspective;

* Drawing my life in the Madhubani style;

* Buying and reading the Ramayana in order to better understand stories depicted in Madhubani art;
* Trying to illustrate stories in Madhubani style;

* Collecting Indian folk designs from fabric, sculpture and metallurgy.

Madhubani paintings for sale at the Delhi Hath

Madhubani Painting Journey - Early Experiments

My Madhubani painting journey has really been a crazy one. It all started with experiments that involved drawing paper, fell tips, permanent markers, poster colors, canvas and oil paint. Now I use the handmade paper and the acrylic paint. Just last week I moved on from using the permanent marker to drawing with the nib and a black ink. It more and more reminds me of the graphical art we studied at school that I used to love. I am more and more drawn to the black and white Madhubani paintings. I love this journey and I like seeing the way it unfolds.

Why I Created A Madhubani Blog?

I wouldn't have started painting Madhubani if I didn't need  illustrations for my YouTube channel and Hindi blog. The majority of the visual content that's available on the Internet is licensed and that was when I started painting Madhubani regularly. I would paint on long pieces of handmade paper, so they could easily fit in my scanner for the better image quality. This turned into a hobby. My Hindi language blog and a YouTube channel became quite overloaded with these illustrations that I decided that Madhubani art needed a separate blog - a place where I can express my passion and save my other blogs from looking like Madhubani blogs.

Red mouthed Madhubani artists at the Delhi Hath

Madhubani blog's Main Goal

My main goal on this blog is to share everything I know about Madhubani and encourage others to share everything they know about it too. I will be uploading my Madhubani paintings colored and uncolored and you can use those as your beginner's trace patterns, you can print, copy, share and distribute them as long as you don't make money from them (it depends, so contact me and let me know). 

Also, I'd like to encourage Madhubani fans and artists to connect with me and tell me more about Madhubani. May it be a little thing, may it be your knowledge of Madhubani symbols or maybe you've visited the Madhubani village and have some photos you could donate to  this blog, I would be soooo happy! Viva la Madhubani! 

*Let me be the beggar of knowledge, fearfully stretching my heart out at you!*