Jivya Soma Mashe

Jivya Soma Mashe was born in 1934 in Dhamangaon, in Talasari taluka of what was then Thane district, Maharashtra, and moved to Kalambipada village in Dahanu at eleven. His mother died when he was seven, and from the shock he stopped speaking for several years, talking instead through pictures drawn in the dust.

Warli painting was traditionally the work of women, made on mud walls in white rice paste for rituals and celebrations, and built from simple geometric shapes: daily life, farming, animals, the natural world. In the 1970s Mashe started to paint not for any ceremony but every day. Recognition came from national leaders and then from abroad, and many young Warli men followed his lead.

Paper and canvas freed him from rough walls, and the line loosened. His pictures are dense with strokes, small figures and swarms of dots arranged so that the whole surface seems to vibrate. Warli legends and village life are his recurring subjects. He summed up the feeling behind them simply: everything moves, day and night, and life is movement.

His work was in Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Pompidou in 1989. In 2003 he showed with the English artist Richard Long at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, and again in Milan in 2004. The Fondation Cartier in Paris acquired six of his works between 2011 and 2015. He received the Padma Shri in 2011, died in 2018 and was given a state funeral. His sons Sadashiv and Balu are both known Warli painters.