Everything inspires him

With a recent autobiography and a new exhibition, artist well-known for his geometric cubist-style paintings, speaks to

the bookshop to find no cards on the shelves. I reluctantly inquired from the bookshop staff and was told that they were all sold out.” Such was the demand for his greeting cards which were initially handmade. “Later on I moved into doing the line printing in a letter press machine and coloured them by hand. I even got the neighbourhood boys to fill in the colour,” Segar smiles.

The Reader’s Digest honoured Segar’s work by reproducing his painting titled ‘The Tea Pluckers’ on the back cover of their February 1997 issue. The same year though he lost his wife Vijeyashanthinie to brain stem cancer. This was followed by a bleak period in his life, with dark thoughts of suicide lurking in his mind. “I was standing on the Glennie Street railway crossing, waiting for the train to come and take my life,” Segar recalls. By some stroke of luck, he remembered that a couple of paintings that he had just finished were left unsigned. “I thought that if I went back and signed them at least my parents could sell them for a good price.” He stepped away from the tracks. “Let’s die another day I told myself,” he smiles in recollection.

Today, Segar lives happily with his daughter Spinndonna and son Donnavandax, as he spends his days painting out life on the canvas. “Painting is an addiction to me, and I cannot go a day without it,” he says. Art has taken Segar to mansions and mud-huts but he is a man who associates with people from all walks of life on the same level. His appreciation of the simpler things in life has propelled him to greater heights and he has no intention of changing his ways.