Word: samant
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Like many young instrument painters fitted in with New York, Mohan Samant, 37, lives at an unfashionable address in a loft building above a street thrumming with trucks. Unlike other young painters, he begins each day not at the easel but sitting shoeless and cross-legged atop a low podium, drawing out the eerie strains of his native Indian music on the sarangi, a chunky instrument fitted with 29 strings. Says the artist, who though an expatriate is ranked as one of his country's most modern painters, "I always felt at one with things that have a sense...
...Samant paints the way he plays music: he tries to combine in the present moment all the root wisdom of past experience. "I believe that a great work of art is timeless," he says, and he learned his art by studying the paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux, Sumerian tablets, and linear Egyptian murals. Prime examples are now on view at Manhattan's World House Galleries. To recapture timelessness in a modern idiom, Samant works spontaneously like an action painter, performing with his passionate pastel colors in such fast-drying media as spackle and plastic wood. Then he watches...
...this seemed pretty untouchable to Samant's well-to-do Brahman family back in Bombay. His father, a high school principal and English teacher, balked at both the sarangi and art as a career for his son-after all, the sarangi is played to accompany dancing prostitutes, and painting is an illustrator's skill. At first, Samant clerked for a British oil company, but at 20 he began five years of study at Bombay's Sir J. J. School of Art. He copied Bashaivali and Jain miniatures to learn design and color, but, says he, "they...
...spoon kerplunk in it. The only true portraits, surprisingly, are Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning's Marilyn Monroe and Pop Artist James Rosenquist's Portrait of the Scull Family. Little-known names among the 102 were Australia's Brett Whiteley and a young Indian named Mohan Samant...