From the Garden
Painted before it was printed
Three weeks in the summer of 2021, one canvas, and a garden that became a bottle.
Most gin labels are designed. Baagh's was painted.
The artwork on the bottle is an original oil painting made for it by Vikas Soni, a second-generation artist best known for his murals at Bar Palladio in Jaipur. It was not adapted from an existing work or assembled from stock botanical prints. It was painted, on canvas, for this bottle.
The name made literal
Baagh means garden. Rather than gesture at that with a pattern or a motif, the brief was to paint one: flamingos wading, a macaw watching from a branch, palms and flowering undergrowth pressing in from the edges. The kind of garden that is not tidy.
Sixteen days
The charcoal sketch is dated 6 July 2021. The finished painting is dated 21 July. The label followed the next day.
You can watch the birds arrive in sequence. The sketch has both flamingos and the macaw already placed. The first painted stage brings the greens up and leaves the sky pale. By the third the macaw has its colour and the sky has gone properly blue. The final canvas is warmer and deeper than any stage before it, which is the difference between a painting that is finished and one that has merely stopped.