The artists
Two painters, one studio. One finds the room in empty space; the other fills every inch with intention.
Sthuthi Art began as Shalini Tomar's studio name and is now shared by two painters working in deliberately opposite registers. Shalini's works in watercolour and ink give a subject room and leave the paper bare; Leela Rani's oils and mixed-medium canvases are dense with ornament and saturated colour. Every work is an original, signed by the hand that made it.
Work is released directly from the studio. If you need to know anything beyond what's written here — measurements, materials, framing — write and you'll get a personal answer.
Forty-five originals. Two hands, one studio wall.
Shalini Tomar · Artist statement
I didn't grow up with a fixed idea of home, so paper became the constant instead. Wherever we were posted, I could always find a blank page, and it never once asked me to explain myself the way a new school always did.
I paint the way I learned to sit still: slowly, and without filling every space just because it's there. A lotus doesn't need the whole page. Neither does Krishna, or a glass of chai going cold on a table while someone finishes a conversation. I'd rather leave room around a subject than crowd it — room feels more honest to me than detail does.
Most of what I paint sits somewhere between devotion and the ordinary, because that's genuinely how I've always experienced both. A prayer and a cup of tea have never felt like they belonged in different registers to me. Growing up, the puja room and the kitchen were often the same kind of quiet. I paint them with the same attention, because to me, they ask for the same attention.
Shalini Tomar · Full biography
I grew up an Air Force kid, which is its own particular way of growing up. My father was posted where he was posted, and we went with him — so nothing about my childhood was fixed except the school uniform and, oddly, a stack of paper. For most of my school years I was at Kendriya Vidyalaya, Air Force Station Begumpet, in Hyderabad, and painting was the one thing that came with me from one year to the next without anyone having to pack it specially.
Looking back, none of it reads like a straight line to Sthuthi Art. But the instincts were already there — sitting with something for a long time without anyone watching, and a comfort with empty space that moving around so much never seemed to disturb. What I paint now isn't so different in spirit from what I was painting then. I've just learned, slowly, to trust the empty parts of the page a little more.
2009
A school drawing competition led to a district one, then a state one. Paintings sent to be judged in cities I'd never set foot in.
Rajahmundry · Chennai · Mumbai
Recognised year after year. I was nine, maybe ten, and genuinely surprised every single time something came back with my name on it.
2010
A Telugu cultural organisation recognised me for chitralekhanam, in the same evening they honoured children for classical dance and music. The first time painting felt like it belonged in that room.
Early teens
A desert posting close to the western border. There wasn't much out there — but there was still a drawing competition, and I won it.
Same year
First place in my father's squadron's own competition. A very serious name for an event with a children's art contest attached to it.
Shalini Tomar · Studio process
01
Watercolour and ink. The watercolours are built slowly, in thin layered washes — I'd rather add another translucent layer than reach for a stronger pigment. The ink pieces move at the opposite pace: a confident line, laid down once.
02
I choose it for texture as much as colour — warmer, deckled, handmade sheets for the ink work, smoother stock for the washes — and I like leaving some of it visibly bare.
03
Worth more than several sharing a page. The empty space isn't something I pass through on the way to finishing. It's part of the finished thing, decided as deliberately as everything else in the frame.
Shalini Tomar · Early recognition
Long before Sthuthi Art existed as a name, painting was already the thing I did without being asked to. Between the ages of about seven and thirteen, I was recognised again and again in children's and youth art competitions and exhibitions across the country.
None of it was glamorous. These were school-level and youth-level competitions, judged the way children's art is judged, with a merit certificate and a signature at the bottom. But it was consistent in a way I've come to appreciate more as an adult — across a decade, across different cities, different languages, different judges, the thread never broke. I was painting long before I had any language for why, and I haven't really stopped since.
The certificates themselves
The works themselves
The second painter
Where pigments meet soul.
Freelance artist. Oil painting, acrylic painting, portraits. Based in Tirupati, India. Leela joined Sthuthi Art with ten original oil and mixed-medium canvases — deities built in faceted planes of pigment, dancers caught mid-turn, ornament carried right to the edge of the canvas.
A fuller biography and artist statement will be published here once Leela has written them in her own words. We would rather leave this space honest than fill it with something she didn't say.
The works themselves
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New work, work in progress, and the occasional corner of the studio.
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For measurements, materials, framing or a private view — I answer personally.
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