Jivya Soma Mashe (1934-2018) was born in Dhamangaon, Dahanu taluka, in the Thane district of Maharashtra, into the Warli tribal community. Self-taught, he began painting after a period of childhood silence, drawing on the ritual wall-painting traditions of his community before moving the practice onto cloth and paper.

His work is built from an economical visual language, human and animal forms reduced to triangles and lines, out of which he generates extraordinary movement and rhythm. Figures bend, gather, and travel across the surface in continuous motion, with no single figure dominating; meaning accumulates instead through the collective activity of the community. Even modern subjects, such as a train, are absorbed into this inherited order, appearing as another form of movement within the same cycle of village life.

Mashe is credited with carrying Warli painting beyond its domestic and ritual origins into a wider field of contemporary art, while preserving its collective, rhythm-driven grammar. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2011 for his contribution to the tradition.