Over 500 splendid motifs, adapted from elegant brocades, include colorful block prints and woven designs inspired by nature — trees, leaves, flowers, buds, animals, and birds. This volume constitutes a superb, comprehensive sourcebook for artists, art historians, textile designers, needleworkers, fabric painters, and other craft enthusiasts.
This collection of 44 original plates of royalty-free designs range from small individual cones, barely an inch high, to full-page motifs. Intricately beautiful.
This sourcebook showcases 1,000 decorative black-and-white motifs plucked from India's many sumptuous handicrafts: stonework, batik, embroidered fabrics, pottery, jewelry, personal adornments, carpets, more.
Superb treasury of 319 royalty-free designs skillfully rendered from French, English, German, Swiss, and Russian textiles of 18th and 19th centuries. Profusion of flowers, leaves, sprays, branches, fruits, and birds.
Rich selection of 124 stylized designs from rare German collection includes lush blossoms, tropical fruits, graceful foliage. Low-cost royalty-free motifs for textiles, surface decoration, more.
It’s the trip of a lifetime—a textile-based tour of colorful Rajasthan, India featuring more than 200 lush photographs depicting everyday life in one of the most vibrant regions in the world. ”Get lost in the beauty of the photographs in Patterns of India, a striking journey through the colorful Indian state of Rajasthan.”—BuzzFeed Patterns of India is a visual experience that offers intimate insights into the diverse and richly hued Western Indian culture. Color is the thread that binds the vast country together, defining every aspect of life from religion and politics to food and dress. Organized by the five dominant colors royal blue, sandstone, marigold, ivory, and rose, this book explores how deeply color and pattern exist in a symbiotic relationship and are woven into every part of the culture. For instance, the fuchsia found in the draping fabric of a sari is matched by the vibrant chains of roses offered at temple, and the burnt orange spices in the marketplaces are reflected in the henna tattoos given to brides and wedding guests. While every color is imbued with meaning, it is often within the details of patterns that the full story comes to light. Photographer and writer Christine Chitnis spent over a decade traveling through, getting to know, and falling in love with the intricate patterns of everyday Rajasthani life. With history and culture-based essays woven throughout the more than 200 stunning photographs of architecture, markets, cuisine, art, textiles, and everyday goings-on, Patterns of India captures the beauty and essence of this unique part of the world.
Incredibly rich treasury of authentic royalty-free designs adapted from artifacts of the Harappa culture, coins and pottery from South India, Ajanta and Bagh murals, Muslim monuments, Buddhist temples, textiles from Gujarat, Punjab, other regions, masks and tribal arts, much more. Immediately usable material or great resource for design inspiration. Introduction. Notes.
"Published to accompany the exhibition The Fabric of India at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, from 3 October 2015 to 10 January 2016"--Title page verso.
This book celebrates India's spectacular textile art. It takes the reader on a visual odyssey spanning 500 years, tracing the images created on cloth for India's magnificent courts and temples, as well as for more distant but not less discerning patrons in Europe and Asia. This book celebrates India's spectacular textile art. It takes the reader on a visual odyssey spanning 500 years, tracing the images created on cloth for India's magnificent courts and temples, as well as for more distant but not less discerning patrons in Europe and Asia. It showcases the motifs and
“Eschewing simple formulation of power's dependence on display, Saloni Mathur offers a brilliantly original disentangling of the anxious and involuted attempts to manage India as an 'aesthetic' project. Her account is rich in archival research, theoretically elegant, and exceptionally engrossing. With remarkable clarity, it opens colonial rule's 'cultural techniques' to a new set of illuminating questions.”—Christopher Pinney, author of Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India “India by Design is an elegant and precise book, remarkable for its conciseness and clarity. Taking a transnational perspective and deftly engaging postcolonial theory, Mathur explores not only the representations but also the representational practices that shaped imperial, colonial, and postcolonial relations.”—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, author of Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage “Saloni Mathur's book is a gathering of rare gifts and talents. With the subtle, searching eye of an expert curator, and the analytic skills of a fine scholar, Mathur explores the diverse scales and conflicting values of colonial design and discourse, arts and crafts. Monumental histories of museums are placed beside the petits recits of post-cards; the picturesque Victorian portraiture of Indian life makes a fine contrast with the celebration of 'modern' Indian art in the diasporic world of non-resident Indians. Always open to the lure and pleasure of Imperial display and spectacle, Mathur is equally astute about its underlying strategies of surveillance and subordination. This remarkable work is deeply engaged in the mechanics and mediations of Imperial authority and its visual signs.”—Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University "Saloni Mathur manages to bring together remarkably diverse strands that make up the contemporary visual cultures of India and provide insights for art historians, anthropologists and cultural theorists alike. India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display illuminates issues that are long overdue but hardly ever addressed in the art historical circles. Mathur's command of theory is truly impressive, but even more noteworthy are her insights about Indian modernity and colonial and post-colonial institutions in and outside of the country."—Vishakha N. Desai, President, Asia Society
