Nilima Sheikh has traveled and lectured on Indian art at many venues in India, and abroad. Having inherited a concern with traditional art forms through her teacher K.G. Subramanyan, she has sought to formulate a practice that is at the same time grounded in its technical aspects and innovative in the uses of technique. Working with casein and tempera, her paintings give evidence of a passionate concern with drawing and colour to produce intensely sensuous and poetic representations of the everyday and the supra-mundane. Her work from the 1980s concerns itself with the immediate environs, with objects, interiors and landscapes, familiar figures, flora and fauna. The series When Champa grew UP from 1984 marks a major watershed in her practice. Here, in a series of twelve small tempera paintings unfolds the narrative of a young girl who goes dirough marriage, torture and immolation at the hands of her husband's family, voicing the artist's concern with the everyday, her measured anger and a resolution of the concern with portraying the unsettling reality of contemporary life through an amalgam of traditional idioms. More recently, her concerns have been more to do with historical dimensions of feminine subjectivity, and with the transcendental urge in the lament of the lover. Her work has straddled many traditions, from the Japanese Ukiyo-e to Rajasthan, Pahari and Mughal miniatures.