Born in Coimbatore and educated in Kerala, K. C. S. Paniker trained at the Government School of Arts and Crafts in Madras, where he later served as Principal. He started out as a landscape painter, but in the mid-1950s turned to figure painting. In the Garden series of pictures he fully merges landscape and figure, painting boldly delineated characters with large eyes and penetrating gazes directed toward the viewer. Unified by the use of color, these figures integrate into a massive whole, forming a kind of psychological landscape.