Instep profiles three celebrities who keep their inner artists alive and thriving.

Ayesha Omar

We’ve watched Ayesha Omar’s style steadily evolve to the level of a regular stunner on the red carpet and her aesthetic strength doesn’t stop there. Ayesha, who designs her own looks and does her own make-up, owes her strong aesthetic sense to her painting experience in her formative years. Few people may know that the girl who played the bashful Sandy from Grease, the feisty Khoobsurat in Bulbulay and the petulant Sara in Zindagi Gulzar Hai likes spending her alone time with a canvas and box of paints. A graduate of the National College of Arts in Lahore, the diminutive Ayesha Omar is a painter of pieces that are larger-than-life. Her favourite piece to date is an imposing 7×5 oil on canvas that "lives in New York" with choreographer Omar Rahim. It’s a pity she doesn’t get to return to her passion as often as she would like, given that her oodles of talent enabled her to bag a distinction in the subcontinent during her A-levels! Although she’s explored themes of womanhood and fertility in the past, she now returns to the easel for a rare moment of self-reflection, producing pieces like this one.

Ali Zafar

People who’ve had the good fortune of having their portraits made by Ali Zafar during his sketching stint at PC Bhurban have serious bragging rights. For 500 rupees a pop, Ali would create the likeness of his customers in 20 minutes – money he pooled together to record his first album. The rest, as they say, is history. Now, as he scales the heights of superstardom, Ali still spends some of his downtime painting and sketching for leisure – a childhood passion that is inextricably linked to his personal life. He often sketches members of his family. He also met his wife, the lovely Ayesha Fazli, at PC Bhurban and he once went on record saying that the subject of his favourite portrait broke his heart.  "She got married to someone else," summarised Ali, while speaking of the personal tragedy. Some of Ali’s paintings, like the piece shown here, have made their way to auction for charitable causes. An interesting comment on the concurrence of ugliness and beauty in the world, the piece was auctioned off to raise funds for flood relief in 2010.

Sarwat Gillani

From scrawling on the walls of her childhood home to having her works of art deck the homes and workplaces of others, Sarwat Gillani has sustained her artistic streak throughout the years. Another art school graduate who went the showbiz way, she juggles her career as an actor with her painting commissions and continues to produce pieces on the request of corporate clients and private buyers. Painting only takes a backseat when she’s involved in an acting project; even then, she returns to the artistic cocoon that is her rooftop studio for a quiet moment. In that space, there is just "music, me and the art," she shares. While she harbours a fondness for landscape painting, trees are a favourite subject for Sarwat, perhaps because "I sense their absence in our surroundings. I feel that if I put up a big tree in a place without any greenery, I can bring a sense of life into the place." The ocean follows as a close second favourite, with pieces such as ‘Blue’ shown here. It is this connection with nature and her keen eye for detail that has made her a more complete actor, she feels.