Boys don’t paint

As a child, Gopesh Sethi used to be good at painting, and his classmates and teachers used to admire his work. But the thought that “boys don’t paint” was fed into Sethi’s mind. So I never tried my hands at fine arts or craft,” he says. Though his family is in the printing business, Sethi left for England for an MBA. In 2014, on a holiday in Australia, he saw a quill art greeting card in a shopping mall, which he purchased. “I was fascinated by this art and thought of replicating it,” says Jalandhar-based Sethi.

But life had other plans. His father’s brain stroke and being the only one to run the business meant he had to return to India in 2015. He took on the family business but kept the artist in him alive. “In 2016, I took out that quill art greeting card I bought from Australia and replicated it. It was a flower and a bird made on card and I just increased its size. It was appreciated by my family, so I tried my hands on quill art. I started making typographical work, using letters of the English alphabet. My first commission came in late 2017, when I made the letter ‘A’, the first letter of the name of my Hyderabad-based client. I earned Rs 5,000 from it,” says Sethi.

Over the two years, he has had clients from across the globe. If for a music video director, he has used the theme of fire and rain through quilling, for a business networking organisation, he has used the silhouette of India to showcase the geography of the land. In another work, which he spells out as ‘Life’, he uses motifs of trees with roots, fish, bees, birds and trees to present a blissful view of the world. He was in Ludhiana for an exhibition.
At 35, Sethi’s works have adorned living rooms of farm houses in Ludhiana and Jalandhar. “I make portraits and typographical work. My other themes include landscapes and the Buddha,” he says. Sethi has also made portraits of bureaucrats in Jalandhar and Ludhiana and recently completed the portrait of his father, who passed away last year.
However, the work close to Sethi’s heart is the one that represents the inner and outer beauty of life. In this, he has made a deer, fish in the sea, falling rain and a person meditating. While the right side of the painting shows the Buddha, a bird and the person in meditation, on the left are trees, water and nature, reflective of infinity.

Sethi says that while 90 per cent of the material he uses is paper, he also uses wooden veneers, medium density fibres, iron wire, and plaster of paris (POP) as mediums in his work. There are days when all he needs is a few hours to complete a work, but sometimes it takes 5-6 days, and sometimes, three to four weeks as well.
Sethi had plans of exhibiting his work in Chandigarh too. “It’s never too late to try something new. I hardly explored my talent till I was 32, but better late than never,” he says.