#kohbar

[soda-pagoda-blog]

Did I mention I liked Destiny?

No?

I like Destiny.

[soda-pagoda-blog]

I’m obsessed with my lil guy

He’s a devils captain named Kohbar and he has a lovely girlfriend Baroness named Eggie (Ebrygres)

I dunno what to do with their heads, one one side I don’t like them with hair, but on the other they look weird without hair.. like that one Zavala I drew that looked like a cancer patient

Yes, he has a two headed four armed rat friend, that is not one rat on top of another, that is one singular buddy

[yellow-spoons]

Watch the video on #youtube #youtuber #mithila #kohbar https://youtu.be/KoOFJRke6w4 https://www.instagram.com/p/COLQtqsl0l8/?igshid=72fopb9gdr9q

[pzirnis]

The Kohbar of Lotus, Bamboo,  and Clove - a new Kohbar for a new Generation

The kohbar image painted on the wall of a marriage room serves as a talisman to produce a fruitful union and protect the ceremony from the evil eye. The painting must follow a traditional iconography to be effective but in her Kohbar the artist Amrita Das only used some of its elements to produce a recognizable but abstract image of the kohbar.  She said she was “only thinking of Lotus, Bamboo, and the sweet smell of Cloves”.

      In the center, the Lotus plant with its many leaves represents female fertility - always the dominant image in the traditional kohbar as it is here.  The light and dark intersecting green lines represent a stylized Bamboo grove, the male element. Typically the Bamboo grove is much smaller than the Lotus and often gets lost in all the traditional decorative elements of fish, birds and other auspicious images but with her Bamboo grove Amrita Das breaks completely with the accepted iconography and makes a deliberate and significant change. She depicts the Bamboo and the Lotus, the male and the female elements, as equals, the one embracing the other set in a field of red clove flowers which Amrita Das calls “ the spice of married life”. Cloves play an important role in Hindu ritual. They are offered to the gods in temples and protect babies and newly married couples from the evil eye. The four naina-jogins that are painted in the four corners of the marriage room are also present in the four corners of her Kohbar.

     Amrita Das’ Kohbar began as an inchoate idea, not even conscious perhaps,  when Tara Books invited the artist down to Chennai for a book making workshop some time ago. The result was the wonderful Hope is a Girl Selling Fruit, a book of paintings and prose, in which she muses on what it means to be a girl and considers her own future. The life of girls is hard from childhood on. There was always housework to do and no moment for oneself. No time to even dream. Would this ever end she thought. Would she ever have some time for herself?  And even marriage, would that finally give her some freedom? 

     Six years after her marriage Amrita Das answers the question of marriage and freedom for women with her vision of a new kohbar in The Kohbar of Lotus, Bamboo, and Clove.  She sees this new Kohbar not as a ritual formula for fertility but rather as a union here on earth of the cosmic male and female forces in the universe - the Bamboo and Lotus, two wreaths circling each other, are Shiva and Parvati as the god Ardhanarishvara, half male and half female in one body, together but separate.  

     The Lotus, Bamboo and Clove is the third kohbar painting that I’m aware of in the last couple of years which promotes Ardhanarishwara as the example of a marriage based on equality and respect for the female and the male.  Such a marriage is one in which there is freedom. This is what Amrita Das’ revolutionary painting promises, a new traditional Kohbar for a new generation.     

Amrita Das, The Kohbar of Lotus, Bamboo, and Clove, acrylic on a single sheet of Canson art paper, 4x3 feet, 2019. Signed and  available.  

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[pzirnis]

The Kohbar Resplendent

The artist Shalini Karn has used the Covid lock-down time to present us with a wall-sized (7x7 foot) new interpretation of the Kohbar.

    A magnificent Kohbar hovers large over the land its top reaching up into a dark blue sky with barely visible distant mountains.

The Kohbar is elaborately decorated. Six symmetrical medallions, three on each side, circle the center while in their four interstices a naina jogin, in red or yellow sari with one eye uncovered, protects the wedding from evil misfortune. The light blue water teems with gaily colored and auspicious life, turtles, small fish, crabs, snakes and lotus flowers.

The Kohbar’s center is a second kohbar,a shining purain of yellow lotus leaves in an architecture of finely drawn red lines set in concentric circles of dark blue water, green parrots, yellow ornamentation, and the red pistils of the lotus plant. This second kohbar is a microcosm of the ‘maha’ (greater) Kohbar that surrounds it and together they are a paean to the power of the feminine.

This Kohbar is a force of love and joy and union.

There is no longer the submissive bride alone in the palanquin being taken to an uncertain future but rather husband and wife together, facing each other, hand in hand, being carried to their new life.  A pair of entwined love birds in a Kadamba tree sacred to Krishna is next to the palanquin. “And what is Krishna if not love?” asks Shalini Karn.

On the other side are musicians, drummers and horn players, making joyous

music under a mango and mahua tree where, before the actual wedding ceremony, the bride and groom held a ritual marriage with the trees for a happy and long marriage. Note the bride’s rice paste hand prints on the tree trunk and the yellow string tying the trees together.

You don’t see Shiva and Parvati here.  Instead you have Ardhanarishvara,

“the Lord who is also a female”, Shiva and Parvati , the union of male and female in one body. This union is now also that of the bride and groom. They have become one.

Shalini Karn is not the first to use Ardhanarishvara as an attempt to give a religious basis for the equality of male and female in the strongly patriarchal society of Bihar.  The artist Shalinee Kumari has long struggled with the same question and has also painted a kohbar with Ardhanarishvara. But Shalini Karn by taking the kohbar outside the confines of the marriage room and into the open air has lightened the weight of tradition.  She uses the figure of Ardhanarishvara to support the equality of male and female and thus her emphasis is on the love and joy of marriage and the open future of possibilities promised by her Kohbar, glorious over the land and the infinite blue sky.

   Shalini Karn, The Kohbar Resplendent, acrylic on canvas, 7x7feet, 2020. The work is signed and is available.   

[mayankpal94]

#kohbar #kohbarart #art #painting #madhubani #madhubanipainting #bihar #biharmuseum #patnarocks #patnalife #patnabeats #bvpatna #photography #artphotography #patnalikes (at Bihar Museum)