On April 20, Day 4 of his quarantine, Arjun Rampal who had tested positive for Coronavirus posted a picture of him contemplating a canvas with the caption, “trying something new”.
That set us thinking about Bollywood’s artists. While most have seen Salman Khan’s paintings and know that Sonakshi Sinha auctioned some of hers last year to provide ration for daily wage workers rendered jobless by the lockdown, very few must be aware that Bareilly Ki Barfi and Panga director, Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, has a diploma in Applied Arts from Mumbai’s Sophia Polytechnic.
A gold medalist, who has majored in Typography and Colours, Ashwiny admits that as art turned from passion to profession, the little books she carried around with a box of colours and brushes, lay forgotten in a box. She stumbled upon them and her sketches while cleaning out cupboards during the lockdown and felt the need to revive her core strength. “I started with line drawing of plants since I love nature and botanical art became a way of life for me over the next six months. Then, observing that many artists were creating digitally, I started doodling on my iPad every day for two hours. I recalled my mother marveling at how I could patiently sit for hours and just paint and wanted to go back to the process of creating without any deadlines or rules,” she shares.
pics courtesy: Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari
pics courtesy: Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari
She’s been using every tool from the iPad and Apple pencil to Adobe Creative and Procreate to speak her mind and admits it’s a liberating feeling starting from scratch and creating something, at times erasing and starting again. “Some days I sit for just a few hours, on others I work on a piece for the whole day,” says Ashwiny, admitting that the stress of the ongoing pandemic can be released through patterns, colours and textures. “It’s like yoga… meditation. Art therapy has become an important part of the human ecosystem. What you cannot say, you write, paint, cook or crochet.” She has started an art journal, a page a day, and promises to have a whole book of colours in 365 days. “It will be nice to look back on this journey, which helped me reclaim an important part of myself that I had lost in the flurry of work and responsibilities during trying times,” she exults.
Last March, Mouni Roy who was spending time with her sister in Dubai, also decided to get back to the drawing board. Growing up in Cooch Behar there hadn’t been much by way of entertainment so they had danced and painted, made houses from fallen branches, pottery and puppets, watched idol makers mould clay murtis of Maa Durga and make their own. Her biggest joy back then had been the three-hour classes with ‘Drawing sir’, sometimes alone, sometimes with other students.
Going back to one of her first loves, Mouni produced a trilogy of Shiva paintings, which won her lots of appreciation and encouraged her to do more… From a girl reading Frankenstein on a windy afternoon to a pencil sketch of another on the beach and a third more colourful one, tossing confetti in the air and dancing. In this Insta exhibition there’s also a beautiful picture of Maa Durga. Some of these art works were auctioned to help those struggling for basics in her home state after the Amphan cyclone.
Alaya F was also not just another doodler in class, the Jawaani Jaaneman actor won the prestigious Balak Ratna National Art Award when in the ninth standard and even toyed with a career in art. Starting with water colours and acrylics, she settled for pen, pencil and markers to come up with intricately detailed designs.
Farhan Furniturewala and Pooja Bedi’s talented daughter has been a busy girl during this last year-and-a-half with a host of activities but occasionally offers a sneak peek of her artsy Sundays and ‘Quarantine Art’. “Amidst all the chaos… find something that brings you peace,” she advises.
