About Choti Tekam Artwork

Gond art descends from an oral, wall-painting tradition of the Gond and Pardhan Gond communities, historically made with natural materials — charcoal, coloured soil, cow dung, and plant sap — used to decorate mud homes and mark festivals and rites of passage. Since the 1980s, pioneered by artists like Jangarh Singh Shyam, the tradition has moved onto paper and canvas, using ink pens and acrylic paint while keeping its visual grammar intact.

Choti Tekam works firmly within this contemporary idiom. She begins each piece with a bold black outline of her subject — an elephant, a pair of deer, a bird-filled tree — and then fills every inch of that outline with dense, hand-drawn patterning: fine parallel lines, dots, dashes, curved strokes, and scale-like or chevron motifs, each chosen to suggest a particular texture, whether fur, feather, bark, or leaf. No single patch of colour is left plain; the patterning itself becomes the shading and the story.

Her palette is vivid and unconventional by design — a deer's body might shift from warm ochre to cool blue, a tree trunk striped in contrasting tones — reflecting the Gond belief that art should spring from imagination rather than strict realism. This combination of meticulous linework, saturated colour, and the Gond conviction that nature is animate and sacred gives her paintings their distinctive, layered, almost hypnotic surface.