Satyakam Mohkamsing
Dutch Indian Surinamese. Three soils, one set of hands.
Satyakam was seven when his first teachers, the brothers Satyaprakash and Dipti Mohanty, gave him a violin and a brush in the same room in Varanasi. He has never quite put either down.
He trained as a violinist at the Codarts conservatory in Rotterdam under Lenneke van Staalen and the late Pandit Dhruba Ghosh, then returned to India to study with sarod master Biswajit Roy Chowdhury and flute maestro Hariprasad Chaurasia. The painting kept pace with the music, in school books, between rehearsals, late at night when the ragas wouldn't leave him alone.
The work on this site comes from the last decade of that double life, drawn chiefly from Saraswati and Shiva, with Ganesha and the musicians he meets on tour completing the cast. Each canvas begins as a raga imagined visually — its mood, its movement, translated into colour and line before it becomes paint. He paints from sound, and from sleep: what arrives in a dream is carried straight onto the canvas.
Work in progress
Every canvas passes through weeks of underpainting before the flames arrive. A few stages, unposed.
The other half of the practice
Satyakam continues to perform North Indian classical violin across Europe, India and the Americas.
"What you see is what you get. I make what I hear, through dreams, music, and spiritual stories."
