Tapi art teacher’s house tells Covid tales with warli paintings

Surat: While the unprecedented times have unleashed copious amounts of creativity in people, a drawing teacher in a remote tribal hamlet of Tapi district found his own domain to be a perfect medium to tell the tale of Covid-19 for generations to come.
Inspired by the changes in the world after the pandemic outbreak, the 47-year-old teacher Tulsi Patel, who works in a Surat school, chose his native house in Pathakwadi village as the landscape to describe the corona story and life after it using the tribal art form - warli.
Patel first applied ‘lipan’ — a mixture of dung, red soil and dried peel of food grains - on the walls for a bright red base on which he painted the Covid tales in Varli form with natural white clay paint.
The elements include names of doctors, nurses, sanitation workers, police, armed forces, fire fighters, teachers and security personnel, families locked in homes, empty roads and closed industrial units. Patel has depicted 108 ambulances as angels, online meetings over mobile phones, social distancing, migrant workers undertaking arduous journeys on foot carrying kids on shoulder etc.
“I utilized objects that are normally used in the traditional art form. This amount of painting normally requires two days to be complete, but my elaborate design took me 20 days — from conceptualizing to execution,” Patel said, adding that after completion he made a video of his house and shared it on social media.
His efforts turned monumental with the painted walls attracting a huge number of visitors to his home, art aficionados or otherwise.
“Though locked up inside our homes, I understood the magnitude of the historic times and so decided to document it through painting,” Patel, who teaches art at Jivan Bharti School in Nanpura area, told TOI.
“After watching the video, I decided to visit Patel’s unique art house and liked it very much. It is truly an unusual work,” said Bharat Vyas, a resident of Surat.