Making the most of this lockdown, actor Arshad Warsi has gone back to his passion — painting. He recently shared one of his lockdown arts on social media and captioned it, “Just painted her! I like her lockdown smile’.
Revealing that he had picked up the brush for the first time long back, the actor says, “I used to paint a lot. In fact, I stopped. What happened is, when you oil paint, the house smells a lot, so I didn’t do it. Then we got an outside area, I started it again. It’s been my passion forever.”
What also led to painting taking a backseat in Warsi’s life is his career. “Suddenly, when necessity comes into the picture, your passion starts to take a back seat, that’s what I believe in. All the things I had to let go of, to get on with life. Now when I’ve got the space too, I thought I might as well do it,” he says.
For the actor, 52, the themes of his recent paintings have been in sync with the current crisis throughout the world, the spread of Covid-19.
“The atmosphere, surroundings, all of that somehow gets into creativity, whether you like it or not. My last couple of paintings went into this state the world is living in right now – uncertainty, chaos. So it’s there at the back of your mind and it comes out on the canvas. In my head, this thing was going on, and I said it what it is. It’s going to be there at the back of your head, there’s no going back now,” explains Warsi.
We ask him whether he paints for himself, or plans to exhibit his lockdown art once things get back to normal. “I actually do it for myself, but my wife Maria (Goretti) said I should (exhibit). I don’t know… At the moment, I do it because I like it. What happens mostly is that I do a painting, friends come over, and whoever likes it, picks it up and goes home,” he ends.
