The artist and his beauties

Thota Vaikuntam is proving to be a serious buy for most collectors.

This weekend, with Thota Vaikuntam on his way to London where his works are going to be displayed at the Air Gallery on Dover Street, you can expect the diminutive, 60-something painter to be overcome with shyness.

Uneasy before urban crowds and critics, he's amazed at his new-found fame, even though he's hankered the better part of his life seeking it.

A "farmer" by profession, an artist by instinct, an art director for films for large chunks of his life, Vaikuntam has made the burlesque Telengana women his particular signature style, claiming these large, buxom, bright saree-clad women from the Telengana district in Andhra Pradesh for his canvas.

In his early years of struggle (penury even), he was unclear about the direction his creative energies should take. In the seventies, he was to find that muse in his own mother and her daily chores.

Soon enough, the film characters he sketched as art director began to take on the initial hues of the life he saw around his village women. "I found my roots in my drawings of my mother," he confides.

And from that tentative start, he began to immerse himself in creating a style that has since proved to be distinctively his "" though there's no shortage of people now copying him, as his rates escalate beyond his wildest dreams.

Not that Vaikuntam has ever painted for the monetary value of the market. "What will I do with so much money?" he asks almost in despair. Sunaina Anand, gallerist with Art Alive, who's taken "ownership" of the artist with a retrospective of his work earlier in the year, a book, and now the London show, says, "There was a time when Vaikuntam would give two works to one gallery, two works to another gallery, but solo shows were rare."

In that sense, his discovery has been recent, though his Telengana beauties have been desirable options for collectors for some time, and prices have doubled and quadrupled in the last decade alone.

But over the years, even as Vaikuntam's women have lost their naivety and appear more sophisticated, shorn off the details of fussiness in their sarees and their jewellery, it's clear Vaikuntam is looking for increasing freshness within his oeuvre. "He wants to spend more time in Delhi," Anand says, "studying other artists."

But next week, it is his unfinished work other artists and collectors will be putting under the scanner as they study how his lines move, as he sets about completing a work as part of the exhibition process in London.

"Even though he's shown in New York in April 2005," Anand says, "he's never been shown outside the country on such a large scale" "" that's 32 works, some of them larger than his standard 20"x30" canvases. Anand, ambitiously, says future generations will view Vaikuntam in the same light as Jamini Roy.

Perhaps, if he's able to extend the scope and content of his art within the ambit of his Telengana beauties. But even otherwise, Vaikuntam isn't likely to disappear off the marquee of contemporary art for several generations to come.