Artist Bio
Satish Prabhu. Colorist. Painter. Writer. Storyteller.
Bombay beginnings. Chicago and Oak Park years. A slower life in Portugal. A world absorbed into color.
The journey · Inside the studio · The conversation · Shows & recognition · Visit & connect
A room, a window, a world within. Step into All the Dreams of the World →
A Life Absorbed into Color
Satish Prabhu makes paintings from what life leaves behind: a remembered room, a line of poetry, a photograph, an encounter that refuses to become ordinary again. These are not simply subjects. They are part of what the paintings are made of.
Born and raised in Bombay, shaped by years in Chicago and Oak Park, he now lives in Portugal. Its slower pace offers a different proximity to light and everyday life than he experienced in the American Midwest. He returns to his Oak Park studio a couple of times a year and for shows.
A different light. A different pace. Read Lisbon in June: A Meditation on Belonging →
Before the abstraction
His mother was his first art teacher. As a child in India, he studied drawing and painting, developed his skills and won awards. After a twenty-year interval, he returned to studying art in Chicago through oils, plein-air painting and realism. In Oak Park, that foundation gradually opened into abstract figurative painting and abstract expressionism.
His practice remains largely self-directed, guided by curiosity, persistence and a willingness to let a painting overturn his intentions.
The Painting Finds Its Own Way
Satish’s mixed-media works are deeply textural, built through painted layers, photographs, collected papers and writing. A surface may accumulate dozens of unplanned layers. Something is covered, something survives, and something unexpected insists on staying.
The result is often unrepeatable, even by the person who made it.
Windows, memories, seasons and solitary, expressive figures recur across his work. His Window, Introspection, Bathers and seasonal series have emerged through the practice itself rather than from a fixed program. Figures hover between recognition and abstraction; places are reconstructed rather than reproduced.
Beneath their differences run questions of belonging, memory, absence and how we remain present for one another across distance.
Explore the original paintings →
A Conversation Across Arts & Languages
On the canvas: Matisse, Cézanne and Munch.
In the poetry: the Marathi voices of Grace and Khanolkar; Ghalib and Gulzar in Urdu; Pessoa’s restless interior worlds.
Beyond the page: Bergman’s cinema and postmodern French philosophy.
They enter the studio with everything else he reads, photographs, notices and lives through. What emerges is not an illustration of those influences, but their transformation into shapes, colors and relationships.
A chair at an estate sale, a postcard found in Paris, a figure in a museum, a room remembered after leaving it: these encounters become starting points rather than subjects to reproduce faithfully. Indian, American and Portuguese experiences meet on the same surface, without needing to resolve their differences.
From Looking to Making
Sometimes the story begins with something small enough to walk past. Read The Flowers That Kept Me Company →
Writing is part of this practice. Satish documents how paintings come into being because the experience behind a work matters as much as the process visible on its surface. He wants to leave a record of what entered a painting, not simply a sequence of techniques that could be copied from a demonstration or condensed into a reel.
The layers have a history, even when they conceal it.
Open the Art Blog → · Follow the process on YouTube →
For him, creating is not an activity separate from living. It is a way of paying attention, absorbing the world and answering it. The determination to make something from that encounter is central to what it means to be human.
Selected Shows & Recognition
- 2026: A Wanderer’s Palette — A Show of Journeys, Cafe Vigo, Oak Park.
- 2025: A solo show, Vigo Cafe, Oak Park.
- 2023: Creative Connections, Oak Park, with René Arceo and Phyllis Frick.
- 2022: Headspace, Best of Show at Oak Park Art League’s Faces and Models; Galewoodstock, Chicago.
- 2021: Gallery Sabine, Chicago; GIT-LIT, Chicago; Cries and Whispers at Fulton Market Operative.
- 2019: Conception Art, New York and Chicago; GIT-LIT, Chicago.
His experience includes an art residency in Orquevaux, France, in 2019, and Fablab in southern Portugal.
In private collections across Europe, India and the United States.
Two Studios. One Continuing Conversation.
Satish lives in Portugal, with a studio in Monte Estoril, Cascais, and maintains his studio in Oak Park, Illinois. Studio visits are by appointment and depend on where he is working.
Ask about a painting or arrange a studio visit →
Find an original · Browse art prints · Visit SatishFactory on YouTube
Continue the Conversation
Meet the paintings, or follow the stories that brought them into being.