Bengaluru: Pritesh Dagur’s road to success has been full of twists and turns, but it did get her where she'd always wanted to be! An artist who specialises in quilling, a highly complex technique that involves rolling and spiraling strips of coloured paper to make a design, she has cleared the screening test at the Guinness Book of World Records for the biggest beehive painting in the world.
The painting, which depicts the Seattle skyline, was done in 25 days (365 man hours), using 27,000 strips of paper – that's 8.1 km long! It is 5.5 ft wide and 3 ft high. “I'm fairly confident that I will set a world record because nobody has applied under that category yet, Guinness has told me that they will have to create one for me." This internal review process will take about six weeks.
Growing up, art had always been her first love. Life took its course and Pritesh found herself studying chemistry at the Indian Institute of Science. Armed with a PhD in Materials Sciences, she travelled to Belgium for her postdoctoral research. "After that, I got married and moved to Sweden, where I began on a second post-doctoral research," she said. She worked in Stockholm for a year and a half and published several papers.
