Born in 1999 AD to a family without any exposure to the arts, young Dhoju found himself being praised by his classmates for his drawings of pictures found in his textbooks. For Dhoju, the praise he received each time he drew became the drive-through in which he would find the courage and discipline to take on hyper-realism as an art style. Hyper-realism aims to model a subject as accurately as possible, such that the subject becomes almost indistinguishable from the art. Each stroke and each shade has to have meaning and goal, there is no room for error in hyperrealism, and that excellence is exactly what Dhoju’s artwork shows.
During the year-end holidays in high school, Dhoju would draw obsessively to a point of physical exhaustion. After high school, he joined the Pulchowk Institute of Engineering to pursue a degree in architecture. Dhoju regards architecture and art as being siblings although with different end goals and takes inspiration from architects like Le Corbusier, Frank Gary, and Bjarke Ingles.
Discipline, says Dhoju, is what really helps him stay focused and improve when making hyper-realistic artwork. When asked where the discipline comes from, Dhoju’s answer is simple, passion. According to him, the only way one can develop is through driven discipline and questioning the excuses that we make in our journey to development. Dhoju started quantifying his work, counting how many hours he worked every day to get the highest degree of mathematical accuracy in his practice.
Dhoju aims to continue his work on hyper-realism using charcoal and graphite, two sketch mediums, notoriously known for their difficulty to work together. Ten thousand hours, it is said that one must work to become an expert, Dhoju has completed only thirty-five hundred.
