The Late Bloomer

At New Delhi’s Art Alive Gallery, where a solo retrospective of his work from 1980 to 2024 is on display till 20 November, 82-year-old Thota Vaikuntam seems dwarfed by his own paintings, as he walks among the exhibits on a Saturday morn­ing in October. He pauses before some of his sketches and paintings, offering lacon­ic, and mostly critical, takes, pointing out flaws in technique and the rough edges, commenting on the choice of media and evaluating the stages through which his art would pass before it came to embody the rich vividness of its current form.

“I didn’t know what I was doing then,” he sniggers as we stop before an early attempt from the late 1980s, where the acrylic hadn’t quite settled into the texture of the paper. A series of charcoal portraits, in which glimmers of his late style are visible, get an appreciative nod, while a more recent work is singled out to explain the evolution of the black and grey wash­es he has cultivated through the years.

By the time we have covered the first floor of the gallery, it feels as though we have finished turning the pages of a flipbook, albeit slowly and deliberately, and witnessed the transformation of ten­tative human forms into fully fleshed figures, throbbing with life and verve.

Unsurprisingly, portraits of men and women from rural Telangana, which have been the hallmark of Vaikuntam’s style for decades, loom large across two floors of the gallery. In the perfectly lit interiors, the colours pop, sparkle and shimmer, heightening the easy appeal of the compositions. On the second floor, a short documentary on his life and influ­ences plays on loop, giving the viewer a glimpse into his philosophy and practice, especially his love for his mother, a key figure in his artistic imagination.

For those familiar with contemporary Indian art, a painting by Vaikuntam is instantly recognisable from its signature style: dark-complexioned women and men from rural Telangana, the former standing out in their voluptuous forms and dazzlingly bright attires, while the latter often character­ised as pandits or Vaishnavites by the mark of a tilak on their forehead or identified as peasants and manual labourers from their wiry physique. Some of the paint­ings are graced by the presence of a parrot or two; in others, a baby Krishna among cows brings in a pastoral and spiritual aura.

It may seem surprising given his now all-too-familiar idiom, but it took Vaikuntam the better part of his long career to arrive at this unique synthesis of forms and colours. “I was well into my 40s, when I started painting the women and men of my childhood village Burugupalli in Telangana,” he says. The provo­cation behind this decision was the artist, KG Subramanyan, un­der whom Vaikuntam studied at MS University in Vadodara in the 1970s.

Mani-da, as the legendary art­ist and teacher was fondly called by students and admirers, was an instigator of trends. A prolific painter, printmaker and sculptor who played with a multitude of media, from terracotta to silk­screens, he was the inspiration behind a generation of students from MSU, as well as Visva-Bharati University in West Bengal, where he taught for many years. Bhupen Khakhar, Haku Shah, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Nilima Sheikh and Laxma Goud were among his star pupils.

“In those years, when I was struggling to find my way through Western art, Mani-da sat me down one day and told me, ‘I can’t tell you where to go with your art. You have to decide, what is it that you want to do?’” Vaikuntam says. “At the end of that conversation, he gave me home­work to go back to my ancestral village, explore my culture, and come back with fresh ideas.” Little did Vaikuntam know at the time that this visit would change the course of his career.

At the centre of Vaikuntam’s remem­bered village of his childhood were women, especially his beloved mother, who never knew a moment of idleness. Robust and sturdy, she looked after the family, keeping her hands busy, while his father ran a small business. “It was a pleasurable time,” Vaikuntam recalls. “People led thrifty lives then. We got everything needed to live from the village, except for salt, which had to be brought.”

Homegrown theatre was the best-loved form of recreation, with perfor­mances based on epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata being popular with the audiences. It is in this self-contained niche that Vaikuntam grew up, before he decided to leave for Hyderabad to study art in defiance of his father’s wish­es. In a society, where everyone had their assigned roles in the hierarchy of the community, he rejected the utilitarian life of an entrepreneur to set sail on the uncharted waters of the arts.

Vaikuntam’s latest show is accompanied by a handsome volume titled Redefining the Cultural Gaze (published by Art Alive Gallery), with texts by art historian and critic Ashrafi S Bhagat and Pallavi Surana, an independent curator and art writer, tracing his legacy back to his childhood days in Burugu­palli. In a sense, this book is a sequel to The Man and his Women (2005), his first publication with the gallery, which also explored his evolution as an artist.

In the intervening 20 years, Vaikuntam’s style has become more defined, though the subtle shifts may not be easily evident to untrained eyes. For one, the textural details of his figures have become richer. In her essay, Bhagat draws attention to the sircilla sarees from Telangana’s Karimnagar district that some of the women in his paintings wear. In a few instances, Vaikun­tam also alludes to the chungudi sarees from Madurai, Tamil Nadu, distinguished by the tiny dots over the fabric. These patterns are accentuated in the more recent paintings with touches of gold, enhancing the ornate and decora­tive style of his art.

Such intricate detailing, including the large red bindis that the women wear on their forehead, attest to the artist’s acute observational skills. But his close attention to textile and other cultural markers isn’t merely put to the service of mimesis. Capturing these spe­cific images is, for Vaikuntam, a method of recovering the cultural heritage his guru, Subramanyan, had urged him to discover. The romance of his work is in its unique imprimatur, shorn of the baggage of both the West and the East, as the artist likes to remind his viewer. The documentary details are as important as the stylised execution.

In Vaikuntam’s figurative studies from the 1980s, especially ones that were done with charcoal, there is a palpable sense of a struggle to figure out a language of his own. Bhagat briefly mentions the influence of the cubist idiom on the facial composition of Vaikuntam’s women. A close inspection of the ’80s work indeed seems to reveal affinities with Picasso, who influenced Vaikuntam’s contemporaries such as Paritosh Sen and Jogen Chowdhury. But the artist denies any such semblance.

“This is my way of figuring out the best angle to capture this woman’s face,” Vaikuntam says, pointing to a work from 1987. “I don’t work in geometric planes as the cubists did.” The green saree draped on the woman lacks the verve of his mature colours, dating it back to a time when he was experimenting with “cheap poster colours,” as he recalls, unaware of the strides he was making.

In another painting from the same period, there is an outline of a parrot sketched out in pencil but left un­coloured. The bird appears in his later work regularly. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to put it in at the time,” he says. Only much later, thinking back to similar avian motifs adorning the sarees that his mother and other village women wore, he decided to put the bird front and centre in his compositions.

Other commonly found tropes in Vaikuntam’s paintings, including the aforementioned baby Krishna and cattle, hark back to a past that was immersed in religious experiences, where puppetry and performances of plays, often based on stories from the epics, were key forms of public entertainment. Growing up steeped in these rustic traditions of mass entertainment, Vaikuntam developed a keen eye for detail. He would record the design of the jewellery and clothing worn by the performers in his sketches. Such observational skills would eventu­ally come in handy during his successful stint as art director in the Telugu film industry in the 1970s and ’80s.

Over time, inclusion of realistic image­ry became integral to Vaikuntam’s signa­ture style, but never for a moment did he follow the lead of his Indian predecessors. Not for him the Victorian delicacy of Raja Ravi Varma and his nubile, fair-skinned maidens, decked in diaphanous sarees and jewellery, always on the verge of having an intense moment and framed by painted props and faux-classical back­grounds. In contrast, Vaikuntam’s men and women stood or sat without any ostenta­tion, their faces mostly stoic, and unframed by distracting background details. The viewer’s gaze is trained on the poetics of the bodies, with nothing else to seek relief from.

As for the bodies, smooth and shimmering, they appear to have been carved out of black marble. The women are uninterested in striking a pose for a studio portrait, as Varma’s damsels often appear to be doing. Rather, they sit on their haunches, exactly as Vaikuntam remembered them doing from his childhood days. Their faces are lit up with chiaroscuro for effect, not necessarily to depict lines of worry, and they speak most eloquently through their eyes, regarding the world through their sharp, spindly gaze. It’s not surprising that SH Raza, an artist senior to Vaikuntam by nearly two decades, compared him to Jamini Roy, the iconic master from Bengal who, too, had crafted a uniquely distinctive manner of painting the eye.

In spite of the simplicity of his themes, Vaikuntam’s art commands increasing interest among collectors, including for those in their 20s, says Sunaina Anand, the director of Art Alive Gallery. He fea­tures among the top 10 of Hurun India’s Art List of 2024, which ranks artists based on their sales at public auctions through­out the year that ended on January 1, 2024. However, it has taken Vaikuntam several decades to find success, be it artistic or commercial, unlike some of his illustrious predecessors—such as FN Souza, MF Husain, Ram Kumar, and Tyeb Mehta—who were part of the Progressive Artists’ Group. His jour­ney into the limelight through years of poverty, want, a schoolteacher’s job, and much else, is a testament to his unfailing perseverance.

Vaikuntam’s style is neither obviously avant garde, as the Progressives were inclined to think of it, nor is its appeal easily transferable globally. He is a late bloomer, in the sense of one who has tak­en his time to arrive at his unique vantage instead of relying on a visual vocabu­lary available to him from the West. “I didn’t want to copy anyone,” he says with disarming clarity, returning to it like a motto throughout our conversation.

Guided by this conviction, he has dabbled with sculptural forms and film design, but ultimately his chief interest was in draughtsmanship and colour, the combination of which has led him to define his very own accent. Cheered on by contemporaries such as Surya Prakash and Laxma Goud, Vaikuntam has continued to refine and reinvent his technique and palette, producing hundreds of paintings in the process—and continues to do so till this day. Sketching and painting, he says, “is like physical exercise for me.” He is, unabashedly, a painter of people as well as a people’s painter rolled into one, toiling and honing his craft every day, in an artistic milieu where such pursuits may appear innocent and easy.

(Redefining the Cultural Gaze: Works from 1980s to 2024 by Thota Vaikuntam will be on view at Art Alive Gallery, Delhi, till November 20)

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