Mikael Sjödin, born in 1963, is a Swedish autodidact painter, musician and author. At the age of 11 he was impressed by a local artist, who by his own surrealistic painting inspired Mikael to enter into the world of the surreal arts. In painting, Mikael consideres himself to be an individualist and he almost solely works with acrylic on canvas.
As a child and teenager he started out with a rigid, almost compulsive painting technique, developed by himself, using sharp, extremely thin brush strokes and symmetric lines, but since 1996 he has expanded with a more free flow of colour and shape. His main inspiration is his own sub-conscious and unreflected inner reality - dreams - and externally he is inspired by music, psychotherapy and Vedic philosophy. In the established world of art he mainly admires Salvador Dalí. Mikael is not impressed with painting based on primitive daub, which nevertheless is sold for unsavourly large sums and - due to falsely acquired fame - is considered as "excellent art". He consideres the fact that he is uneducated to be his advantage since he is trying to catch snapshots of pure intuition and unreflected realities in his paintings. Too much fancy knowledge and do´s and dont´s would be an obstacle in this regard, he says.
His first exhibitions took place in Ludvika in 1998, where he was living for five years undergoing intense psychotherapy with world-renowned therapist Barbro Sandin. Mikael has survived an extremely unusual childhood filled with daily physical abuse and mental terror on account of his mother´s mental illness. His method of survival was to learn how to immerse in his inner reality and become expert at questioning the value of the external, physical world and its inhabitants. He consideres this to be his real training as an artist, musician and author.
Since 1998 he has worked on and off in the fields of art, music, literature and theatre, and finally building up a proper home recording studio. In August 2007 he is is having his first public exhibition of paintings since 1998, in Njurunda, Sweden, not far from Sundsvall where he is living since 2005.
Mikael is also a practitioner of bhakti-yoga. Since 1985 he has been a devotee of Krishna in the line of Gaudiya-vaishnavism. He has served on and off for 17 years in ISKCON (the International Society for Krishna Consciousness), mainly in the capacity of translator, webmaster and editor of the movement´s Swedish magazine, but also in the kitchen, restaurant and temple.
Mikael consideres himself a follower (shiksha-disciple) of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, but he is a free spirit also, independent of organized religion. Now living far from other Krishna devotees, he serves Prabhupada in his home temple.
