KhuushiArts is the studio and gallery of a single artist working in four traditional Indian art forms: Tanjore, Pichwai, miniature, and canvas painting. Every piece here was made slowly, with the materials and methods each tradition demands. Scroll to walk through the story.
These art forms carry centuries. Tanjore painting grew in the courts of Thanjavur in the 1600s, its gold relief made to glow in oil-lamp shrines. Pichwai has hung behind the deity at Nathdwara since the 17th century, repainted for every season and festival. Miniature painting traveled from Persian ateliers into the courts of Rajasthan and the Punjab hills, where it became something entirely Indian.
Working in them today is an act of preservation. Not preservation under glass, but the living kind: grinding the pigment, laying the gesso, repeating the forms until the hand knows them. The tradition survives by being practiced.
Khuushi curates this collection the way a gallerist hangs a retrospective: each wing of the site is a school of painting, each piece annotated with its year and its story. The intent is simple. A visitor should leave knowing the difference between a Pichwai and a Tanjore, and why that difference matters.
Commissions are taken in all four forms. Some collectors arrive with a deity and a wall in mind; others bring only a feeling. Both are good starting points. The studio works from reference images, room photographs, and long conversations, and no two commissioned pieces have ever been alike.
These art forms carry centuries. Tanjore painting grew in the courts of Thanjavur in the 1600s, its gold relief made to glow in oil-lamp shrines. Pichwai has hung behind the deity at Nathdwara since the 17th century, repainted for every season and festival. Miniature painting traveled from Persian ateliers into the courts of Rajasthan and the Punjab hills, where it became something entirely Indian.
Working in them today is an act of preservation. Not preservation under glass, but the living kind: grinding the pigment, laying the gesso, repeating the forms until the hand knows them. The tradition survives by being practiced.
A Tanjore panel begins as cloth pasted to wood, coated in chalk gesso and raised, layer by layer, into low relief. Only then does the gold arrive: 22 karat leaf pressed onto the raised lines so the surface holds light the way a temple lamp does. Done properly, the gold survives centuries. The notes here record how each panel in this collection was built, and how to keep it: away from direct sun, wiped only with a dry cotton cloth, never with water.
Pichwai means, literally, that which hangs behind. For four centuries the painters of Nathdwara have made vast cloth backdrops for the shrine of Shrinathji, changing them with the seasons and festivals. The lotus for summer, the cows for Gopashtami. Working in this tradition means learning its calendar as much as its brushwork: every motif belongs to a moment in the year.
“The Tanjore piece we commissioned sits in our living room and every guest asks about it. The gold work is finer than pieces we have seen in galleries twice the price.”
“Khuushi took a vague idea, a deity, a color, a wall, and returned a painting that felt like it had always belonged to our family.”
“I bought a miniature as a wedding gift. The detail up close is astonishing; you can see individual strands in the peacock feathers.”
“The Tanjore piece we commissioned sits in our living room and every guest asks about it. The gold work is finer than pieces we have seen in galleries twice the price.”
“Khuushi took a vague idea, a deity, a color, a wall, and returned a painting that felt like it had always belonged to our family.”
“I bought a miniature as a wedding gift. The detail up close is astonishing; you can see individual strands in the peacock feathers.”