LAXMA GOUD was born in 1940 at Nizampur, Andhra Pradesh, he trained at the College of Fine Arts and Architecture in Hyderabad. In 1963, he won a scholarship to study mural painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.University in Baroda, where he became a student of K.G.Subramanyan and specialized in printmaking. His first solo show was held in 1965 and further exhibitions of his drawings, watercolours and prints followed in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. His work was included in the Contemporary Indian Art exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1982) and in-group shows in Calcutta, Delhi and Chennai (1984). His paintings are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, the Salajung Museum, Hyderabad, and the Punjab University Museum, Chandigarh. He presently lives and works in Hyderabad It is the "magic bag of tricks with which I walked into the world of contemporary Indian art", Laxma Goud says of his childhood in Andhra Pradesh. From the dark skinned, vividly clad women who stare out alluringly at the viewer to the snippets of village life - a man and his goat, a serene social gathering, a rustic landscape - the artist's youth in rural South India infuses the imagery of his paintings and prints. The artist left his native Nizampur as a teenager to pursue an education in fine art and has been living in cities for the last 40 years. But these works are not just idealizing backward glances; they also draw liberally from the wells of local folklore and myth. In Untitled, men, women and animals exhibit a serene togetherness, in harmony with each other and with the natural environment. The goat, which is a recurring motif in Goud's imagery, represents this sense of community. Its peaceful co-existence with the villagers is a deliberate contrast to the frenzied, dislocation of urban-dwelling. Goud's images appear to be have but, in fact, his compositions are imbued with curious duality. This is especially the case in his later works, where a celebration of an uncluttered rustic lifestyle is increasingly inflected with the magical draw of urban sophistication. For instance, the poised nudes (hints of artistic training) and the fashionably garbed dancing girl at the center of Untitled are dissonant elements in the otherwise pastoral setting of the painting. "I like the intimacy of paper, pen and ink. My work is within my own body, my own systems and doesn't require much external support like large canvases or spaces. The closeness between my mind and my hand and the paper is a loving idea. It also fits into the regional content where as a child I used to sit on the floor and eat. "We come from a culture which spoke openly about the man-woman relationship, about fertility. I am trying to understand it in aesthetic terms, not for its thrill"....Laxma Goud, 1995. Goud is pre-eminently an artist of ribalt Eros. Sexuality is rarely absent from his works. At times, it is just there as in the scenes of men interacting with wide or partially nude women. Sometimes it is concealed, overtly or covertly, Sexuality is omnipresent and this is as Goud would wish - " The positive and the negative confronting each other is something we find everywhere". "Off all the aspects of village life, his response to the erotic experience is most sensitive and vivid. The unriddled sex life in the village symbolised for him freedom from inhibitions that constrained the sexual experiences of the city folk. The instinctive discovery of his own reotic sensibility triggered his imagination, stirring his inus into action"...G.M.Sheikh, Andhra Pradesh, L.K.A., 1980. "The narrative method led him to the depiction of details with emphatic contours, which in turn suggested introduction of images drawn from observation. The replacement of fantasy with observation slowly but eventually changed the idiom as well as the content it held. The pre-historic animals began to resemble warthogs and boars or both. The Landscape forms began to assume definite personal characters as well as rational proportions. As the aura of surrealist dreams was reduced and the narrative defined the expressionist formal devices also began to wane". " At this stage Laxma used a traditional technique of sectioning the picture into frames in some of his prints. Like some of the compositional devices in the work of Husain and Subramanyam. It was adopted from the rectangular format of frames in a register in traditional narrative pictures, as also from the format of a film"....G.M.Sheikh, L.K.A. AP 1981. "I want my audience to see my work as an insider, as someone who understands what I am doing. I want to seduce them with my line. When there is such seduction, when such an interaction takes place between the viewer and my work, there is a pure sense-laden moment of communication. You can't explain it. Maybe you can call it love, peace, affection, all these things are there at that moment. It's a point of pure joy. What is this quality? Can you find it hidden in a line? That is the mystery that only a true artist can bring out."... Cymroza Annual, 1991-2 Laxma Goud plays the Sutradhar or the traditional storyteller. He sits on the floor of his studio and, with his pencil and brush, weaves a story of man, woman, goat half-goat, half-man or half-woman. These are his protagonists in the world of uninhibited fantasy and eroticism. According to the artist "there is eroticism in nature itself". He strikes a flawless balance. Humour, earthiness and vitality emerge as Laxma transforms the characters - man into goat, goat into woman, peering lustfully at each other. Apart from Laxma's great narrative ability, his remarkable skill and sophistication in handling his medium - pencil or brush - set him apart. With finely chiseled lines, Laxma builds up a world where the "crude is rendered touching, the wildly erotic natural and each of his figures bent with age, swollen with lust, reaching out or embracing is wholly human". ExC Chamatkara, Whitelays Art Gallery, London, Oct- Nov 1996.