We all have received letters from friends and family, stamped with small colourful squares of paper, evoking imagination and intrigue of faraway places, famous moments in history and tales of explorers, scientists, leaders and commoners. Many are miniature works of art.
Meet Deepa Melkote, an 84-year-old, who creates her own works of art from stamps.
Melkote collects old Indian postage stamps and makes intriguing collages of mythological figures, colourful dancers in lehengas, historical monuments and places of worship, such as the the Madurai Meenakshi Temple, the Tungabhadra Dam, the Howrah Bridge, and Bangalore’s Vidhana Soudha out of them.
What inspired Melkote to create her collages?
Melkote’s son, Nikhilesh was an ardent stamp collector since childhood. “I actually took this is up because of my son’s hobby,” she says laughingly in an interview with Deccan Herald.
“Right from childhood, he was into stamp collection. He would keep all the good stamps and throw away the torn ones or the ones that were not very special. I felt bad seeing the thrown away stamps; they were all so colourful. I had read in a magazine about a British lady who made a wallpaper from stamps and that inspired me to create these paintings.”
Melkote has been creating collages for 40 years now.
How does she create them?
The first step is always drawing a rough sketch and then choosing the stamps. Sometimes, she has had to wait for weeks to get her hands on stamps of a particular colour. During this time, her entire family joins in on the hunt.
After this, she cuts the stamps into various shapes and sizes to fit the image she wants to create. “My friends and family tell me they could never do something like it. It requires patience and time — things which no one seems to have these days”, says Deepa in the same interview.
What’s next for her?
Although Melkote’s art has been featured in various newspapers and online social platforms and exhibited publicly, she has no extensive long-term plans for her hobby.
Written by Shreya Shashank
Featured image source: The Better India
