Canvassing cigars

Artists translate their experience of cigar smoking into vivid and quirky paintings on canvas.

If you loose a thought, light a cigar — everything will just fall into place’. This is what these artists were told during a seven-day camp held in Bijwasan, Delhi, to initiate cigar inspired art.

“The concept is to create an art form for cigar lovers, in varied mediums of art, be it canvas, photography, installation or abstract,” says Manish Dutt, representative for Cigar Art Company, the organisers.

14 artists — Koustav Nag, Mousumi Biswas, Akshay Annand, Chintan Zalavadia, Gopal Samatray, Indrajit Prasad, Rakesh Ratan, Santosh Andani, Saptrishi Naskar, Stalin Joseph, Syed Ali, Vijay Sharma, Vipul Prajapati — were part of this camp. There were interactive sessions, videos, photographs and tasting sessions. The artists were told to interpret their experiences on canvas. The result: 14 quirky paintings on cigar inspired art.

“It’s very difficult for an artist to work when he is given a theme, this whole experience was quite challenging. But since I work on relationship based themes, I could connect to this to genre. My painting depicts the romantic and passionate relation between a smoker and his cigar,” says artist Satadru Sovan.

For Arif, a non-smoker, the camp was a challenge. “Since I don’t smoke, for me it was a challenge. My painting is divided into two parts. One has a man’s mouth tied with a piece of cloth — this depicts ‘don’t say anything to a person who smokes cigar because for him its an luxurious experience and will never listen to you’, and of course the other part shows a hand lighting a cigar,” says Syed Ali Arif.

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The paintings are on display at Enigma Art Gallery, 1/25, Asif Ali Road till March 31.