Wall painting of the Warli Adivasi people of coastal Maharashtra: white rice paste on a red-ochre mud wall, laid with a bamboo twig chewed into a brush. Humans are two triangles joined at the tip with a circle for a head, no faces, no shading, everything a single line.
Circle, triangle and square carry the meanings: sun and moon, mountains and trees, the sacred enclosure. The spiral tarpa dance is the signature scene. Traditionally painted by women for weddings and harvest; Jivya Soma Mashe took it onto paper in the 1970s.
A noise field makes the mud wall. The figure keeps his head, glasses and quiff as a white outline so the likeness survives, while the body goes Warli: an inverted triangle torso, an upright triangle at the hips, and single-line limbs taken from the rig's own axes. The dance around him is our composition.
No Devchauk and no goddess square, which are the ritual images. Credit: the Warli (Adivasi) tradition.