Cigar Still Life

Michael Moretti
Posted: October 23, 2006

You have a space on the wall behind your smoking room couch that needs something. The still life of the vase and bowl of fruit just doesn't seem to capture the mood and you're a bit old for the neon beer sign. Perhaps Joan van Roden White can help you with your decorating.

The Massachusetts artist has found beauty and inspiration in the cigar and discovered a responsive audience who shares her perspective. For the past five years, she has been putting smoking subjects on canvas. She started out painting cigar portraits on a commission basis. Like the parents of prized pooches in the rococo age, owners would bring their favorite cigars to White to have the visage immortalized…right before the cigars were sparked and turned into heaps of ash.

While White continues to paint originals, she's now catering to a wider group of aficionados with the release of The Cigar Portrait Collection. It is a limited-edition series of six life-sized cigar paintings. There are 100 of each subject, 600 in total. The giclee images, produced from high-resolution digital scans, are detailed reproductions of White's original oil works that have been grafted to canvas, hand-stretched onto stretcher bars and framed. Each piece is signed by the artist and numbered.

The oil-on-canvas cigar portraitures measure five by seven inches and retail for $875 each. The Cigar Portrait Collection giclee-on-canvas pieces are $200 each or $1,000 for a set of six.

For more information, go to www.vanRoden.com or call 978-526-4833.