KamZour Journal
Stories of Art & Imagination
Art from every tradition, the stories behind it, and how we make it.
✦ Exclusive
For members
Longer stories, with paintings made only for members. Membership opens soon.
All stories
Indian art history
Kalpavriksha: The Wish-Fulfilling Tree in Indian Art and Myth
It rose from the churning ocean, was planted in Indra’s paradise, and spread into Jain cosmology, Buddhist ritual, early stone sculpture, painted cotton and village walls. Here is the story of India’s wish-fulfilling tree, and why it now stands at the centre of KamZour.
KamZour Explains
How Does a Machine Draw a Picture? Explained in Cave Paintings
India’s oldest painters, on the rock walls of Bhimbetka, help explain the newest painting machines: pictures as numbers, noise that is cleaned away, and words that steer every step.
Indian art history
The Sixty-Four Arts: India’s First Curriculum of Creativity
About seventeen centuries ago, a scholar listed the skills of a cultured life. Singing and painting sit beside gardening, cooking, riddles and teaching a parrot to speak. Here is what the list says, who it was for, and why it still matters.
Aesthetics
What Is Rasa? The Indian Theory of How Art Makes You Feel
About two thousand years ago, an Indian treatise on theatre asked the question every artist still asks: what exactly happens inside us when a work of art moves us? Its answer, rasa, went on to shape Indian drama, dance, music and painting.
Behind the scenes
How a Style Is Built: From a Pahari Miniature to Your Idea
What makes a Kangra painting look like a Kangra painting? A close look at the choices behind a great Indian style, the families who handed them down, and how KamZour writes a tradition down so you can create with it.
Art and ideas
Naked or Nude? Why an Artistic Nude Is Not Pornography
Museums, art schools, courts and the largest online platforms all draw a line between the nude in art and material made for sexual gratification. Here is where that line sits, why it sits there, and how KamZour keeps to it.
Indian art history
Love in Indian Art: A History from Temple Stone to Painted Page
For more than two thousand years, Indian artists treated love as one of life’s great subjects. Here is how it appears on gateways and temple walls, in cave murals, miniature paintings and village wedding rooms, and how to look at it today.
Indian art history
The Eight Heroines: Ashta Nayika in Indian Painting and Dance
Waiting, longing, quarrelling, setting out through a storm: classical India described eight states of a heroine in love, and for centuries poets, painters and dancers gave each one a face.
Indian art history
Ragamala: When Music Became Painting
A garland of ragas: how Indian painters gave each musical mode a face, a season, a time of day and a story, and where to see the finest sets today.
Indian art history
Radha and Krishna in the Hills: The Painters of Kangra
In the small hill kingdoms of the western Himalaya, one family of painters and their descendants made some of the most tender pictures of love in Indian art. Here is who they were, how they worked, and how to look at their paintings today.
Folk art
Madhubani: The Painted Walls of Mithila
For generations, women in the Mithila region painted their homes for weddings, births and festivals. An earthquake, a famine and a handful of determined artists carried that art from mud walls to museums around the world.
Modern Indian art
Raja Ravi Varma and the Press That Brought Art Home
A painter from Kerala joined European realism to Indian stories, then helped build a printing press so that ordinary families could own his pictures. Here is how the press worked, what it changed, and why critics still argue about it.