Growing up near the Ganga River in the cultural wellspring of Mithilia, Rambharos Jha spent much of his childhood observing the natural world and traditional arts of the region. When his father began working with a government project to breathe life into local art traditions, Rambharos had the opportunity to study Madhubani women painting walls and courtyards in their renowned Mithilia style utilizing natural dyes and pigments to depict people engaging with nature and deities.
Inspired by these encounters, Rambharos began his artistic painting career in line with the traditional motifs of Hindu mythology but has since evolved his practice to better represent his personal experiences and experimental mediums. Waterlife, published in 2012 by Tara Books, is a culmination of Rambharos’s efforts to balance the delicate traditions of Mithilia art with his contemporary ideas. Waterlife is silkscreen-printed by hand on handmade cotton paper and masterfully plays with adding movement and new subjects and environments to the classic Mithilia medium marrying Rambharos’s childhood memories and folk legends.
Water as a whole is also a physical being with its own soul and spirit and also all vital organs that we find in man and in the entire cosmos. Water also has a womb. The water life on Earth originated here. On some animals, this womb still has appeal when they want to reproduce themselves. The eel shows us the way to the womb of the Water, the Sargasso Sea. Also this mystery, which Earth science cannot explain, is thus solved!
I re-created one of the stages of its short life experiences when it must lay its eggs into the rivers and the lakes before it dies within its 24 hours of living. I used plastic beads as the eggs/larvae as a representation of the continual effect of micro-plastics in our water supply.
“My art is tied up closely with childhood memory. When I was little, my brother and I often went to the river to fish. One rainy day, as we sat on the shore trying our luck, we were startled bby a huge snake forking through the water. Ahead ofit was a valiant frog, leaping away as if its life depended on it.”