Stencil cut may not be recognised as a specialised art form, but here is a young woman who has excelled at making portraits, sceneries and even mythological episodes that have won her awards.
With her suave scalpel cut, Agarwal Jyothsna of Tirupati has recreated many episodes from the Mahabharata using this paper-cutting technique. Having completed her B.Tech in CSE, she is now determined to take a plunge into fine arts.
What started as a pastime during the lockdown in April last year turned out to be a serious hobby. Casual uploads of her images on YouTube brought a deluge of followers, some of them evincing interest to purchase her art works. It was then that she thought of making a career out of paper-cutting art. Her passion has now finally tranformed into a vocation, with the young artist bagging several orders.
Most of the portraits and images are arrived at by cutting out the unwanted areas with a scalpel. For some complicated and larger pictures, Jyothsna relies on mobile applications that convert them into B&W images. The image of Lord Krishna riding a chariot to the Kurukshetra battlefield, manifesting His true self with ‘Viswaroopam’ while narrating the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ and the Pandavas praying to Bheeshma lying on a bed of arrows, are some of the images in the series that won her awards from India Book of Records and Asia Book of Records for ‘recreating the maximum number of images from the Mahabharata’.
“Similarly, ‘Srirama Pattabhishekam’, the coronation ceremony of Lord Rama, is one of my complicated works,” says Ms. Jyothsna. There are images of Lord Ganesh, Lord Shiva, Lord Hanuman, and former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam done on black chart, available in a ready-to-frame format to adorn the walls. Having a serious rethink, she is now keen on pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts course to start afresh on a career that runs concurrent to her passion.
