Thanjavur Painting - Collage

I've always loved Thanjavur Paintings - who does'nt?

When we bought our house, I wanted to setup a nice puja room. I wanted to hang pictures of gods painted using the thanjavur painting technique.

We all just look at the end product and admire its beauty. But, there is so much effort behind it that goes unseen.

This time when I went to India, my mom found this person who teaches tanjore painting classes in Salem. He and his people also make custom painting by order. My sister and I gave him our orders. She had ordered about 12 pics - all different gods.

I ordered like a big frame with about 6 gods in there. I wanted a wooden temple like frame around it so that I can just hang it on my wall and that would be my puja room at home. I wanted Uppliappan Perumal in the middle since he was our Kula deivam. Got Guruvayoor Krishnan to his left and Ramar Pattabhishekam to the right. Rama Pattibishekam has all the 4 brother, Ram, Sita and Hanuman. Then at the bottom, I wanted Ganapathi, Lakshmi and Saraswathi. I gave the order and just hoped it looked beautiful.

In between I visited the artists house to see how the painting was going. He did inform me that it was a big task and they need time to make it beautiful because it is a lot of detail work. I was in no hurry and told him to take his time. Here's how it looked at that time. They were just beginning to work. They worked so hard on my picture to make it perfect.

Last week my mom told me that the picture was complete and they bought it home. Its' just beautiful. Thank you to my artists. Your work is beautiful.

Here's the final picture.

It seems that a lot of people have now visited my mom's place to just see this piece. My mom is now working hard to courier this to me. She is figuring out a good packaging agent to pack this nicely to ship it to the US. Fortunately, they did not use glass on top. Since this was an order to be shipped abroad, the artist told me that they would use a kind of acrylic sheet that just looks like glass but does not break like one. So, I'm hoping shipping this would not harm the painiting.

I'm so waiting for this to reach me. Once its here, I'm planning to break a few shelves on my walk-in pantry and convert that to a puja room on one side. Will update you all when I get the picture and complete my project.

Love live Art!

Here's an update to the above post - http://www.mriganayani.com/2009/05/my-tanjore-painting-is-here.html