Paint away the rainy day blues

Mumbai’s rat-race lifestyle hardly leaves any time between rushing to work and coming home, wilted with exhaustion. A hobby is often the last thing on anyone’s mind. But as the rains drive more and more people indoors, a number of art workshops are being held across the city with the dual purpose of driving away the monsoon blues and giving the workaholics of Mumbai a creative outlet. To make the workshops extra lucrative, artistes and hosts have given them quirky themes and mediums.

Take Trishna Patnaik, for instance, who experiments with mediums and tribal art. The artiste has curated an abstract painting workshop especially for the rains. “It’s a great and colourful way to beat the blues,” she says.

Ask her what the workshop entails exactly and she says that it’s not something that can be put into words. “The specialty about this workshop is that there is no particular picture that the participants are going to be recreating. They’ll simply create a splash with watercolours and paint whatever they feel like. There’s no form or picture. It’s something one must experience to fully understand,” she explains.

The monsoons have had a more direct impact on Shiri Bhagar of Local 2 Do, which curates food and cultural events across the city. “We are doing a workshop on umbrella painting. At most of the workshops we curate, we ensure that the participants have a finished product, which they can carry home with them. And with the rains upon us at last, it just seemed like an appropriate theme,” she says.

Will the paint run though? “No, the finished product is perfectly usable in the rain. We use waterproof paints and even the technique taught at the workshop will ensure that the umbrellas are fully functional in the rain,” she ensures.

The rains often puts one in a poetic mood and Snehal Patil, owner of Bombay Drawing Room, has come up with a great way to mingle art with poems. “We are doing a haiku to art workshop. The beauty of the haiku is that it’s such a spontaneous form of poetry and the artwork that participants will draw inspired from these poems will also be spontaneous and quick. We’ll give just 15 minutes for each picture,” she elaborates.

There are a few challenges that crop up when it comes to asking newbies to create original art, but Snehal has a step-by-step method to ensure the best results. “We have a lot of people who are picking up the brush for the first time after their school days. So, we spend a lot of time in orientation. For instance, we’ll be reading a lot of haikus and even creating some before we write them. I will also be doing a demo where I paint something inspired from a haiku and explain the entire method,” she says.

Ruchi Mehta of the Paint Social is another curator of creative art events in the city. “We had a series on coffee painting and now we are doing one on painting with wine. We do a number of other kinds of painting workshops as well such as umbrella paintings, night paint parties for moms and so on,” she says.

The success of coffee painting is what prompted the wine painting workshop. “Our wine painting workshop also had a lot of people coming in and making good use of the monochromatic painting styles. We are planning to do a few more workshops later in the season,” she adds.