Thota Vaikuntam

Thota Vaikuntam was born in 1942 in Boorugupalli, a village in Karimnagar district, Telangana. He studied at the College of Fine Arts and Architecture in Hyderabad from 1965 to 1970, then spent 1971 and 1972 at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda on a Lalit Kala Akademi fellowship, where K G Subramanyan was his mentor.

He went back to the village for his subject and has stayed with it. His women wear bright saris and vermilion bindis; his men carry toddy pots on their shoulders. Behind them are paddy fields, household chores and temple rituals. He paints in primary colours and refuses mixed ones, which he has said do not exist in the world around him. The women at the centre of so many pictures go back to his mother, Satyamma, and, by his own account, to the village theatre of his childhood, where men played the women’s parts.

The drawings matter as much as the paintings. He works in charcoal, pencil and transparent washes, and the same figures turn up there with even less around them.

He also worked in Telugu cinema. He was art director for Daasi (1988), which won a National Award, and worked on Maa Bhoomi (1979) and Matti Manushulu (1990). A film, Rangula Kala, was made from his own story.

He has received the Bharat Bhavan Biennale award in Bhopal and the Lalit Kala Akademi’s national award, in 1993.