In a world where art often overwhelms through scale, Ghattam Venkatesh has built his reputation by going in the opposite direction, shrinking his canvas to something most people never look at closely: the tip of a pencil. The renowned micro-artist has once again stunned art lovers by carving an intricately detailed idol of Lord Ayyappa onto a graphite point barely a few millimetres wide.

For Venkatesh, who shuttles between Hyderabad and the US, miniature sculpture is not a hobby; it is a lifelong devotion to the culture he grew up with. Though he now works abroad, his artistic inspiration still comes from the soil of his native region — the erstwhile Visakhapatnam and Godavari districts — where he first became known for capturing rural hardship and village life through tiny, delicate clay

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