LAXMAN AELAY & PRIYANKA AELAY
Two Generations, One Line. A launch month deserves a launch story — and few say more about what AshVed believes than a father and daughter who paint the same India two generations apart. Laxman Aelay built his name giving dignity and colour to the working lives of Telangana. His daughter, Priyanka, paints the forests of memory and myth those same lives were shaped by. Neither is "the traditional one" or "the modern one" — they are one lineage, looking at India from two ends of a life.
LAXMAN AELAY
Born in 1965 in Kadirenigudem, Nalgonda district, Telangana, Laxman Aelay comes from a family of weavers of the Padmashali community — his earliest education in colour, motif, and pattern came not from art school but from watching cloth take shape on his father's loom. He went on to earn his BFA and MFA in Painting from the College of Fine Arts, JNAFAU, Hyderabad, but his path to the studio ran through the shop-front and the newsroom first: he began as a signboard painter, then worked as a cut-and-paste artist for the Telugu daily Eenadu in the pre-computer era of production, and later became a widely sought-after book illustrator and designer — work that also included the poster art for landmark Hindi films including Rangeela, Daud, and Satya, and the design of the Telangana state emblem. His paintings are instantly recognisable — bold, flat fields of colour, strong black outline, and women rendered with quiet monumentality: bidi rollers, toddy tappers, weavers, washerfolk, the working women of rural Telangana painted not as subjects of pity but as figures of dignity and scale. It is folk sensibility carried into a modern, gallery-scale idiom — which is, in miniature, the exact bridge AshVed exists to build. "I paint the women I grew up watching work — not as I was told to see them, but as they actually stood in the field, dignity intact."" — LAXMAN AELAY
PRIYANKA AELAY
Priyanka Aelay works in acrylic on linen canvas, building large-format landscapes where forest, myth, and memory sit inside the same frame — a fox here, a tiger there, a jewel-bright bird surfacing from dense foliage, scaled to feel larger than life. Her current body of work grows out of her academic research in film studies and visual culture, and her long-standing engagement with the folklore that locates entire narratives within the jungle — including tales such as Baalanagamma — which has also led her toward large circular compositions that echo the moon's cycles, both a feminine reference and a way of breaking the usual top-to-bottom hierarchy of a painted landscape. Her palette and botanical detail draw visibly on the miniature painting tradition she grew up around, translated into a contemporary, painterly register — proof, in her own practice, of her father's conviction that folk and contemporary are not opposing categories but a single, continuous way of looking at India. "I didn't grow up learning to separate 'traditional' from 'contemporary.' I grew up in a house where both were simply how you told a story."" — PRIYANKA AELAY
