Thangka

The scroll painting tradition of Tibet, Nepal, and the trans-Himalaya Overview Imagine a cloth painting, roughly the size of a window or a small door, mounted in a frame of coloured silk brocade. The fabric is cotton – sometimes silk – and it has been sized with a thin coat of animal-skin glue and chalk so that the surface is smooth, almost like paper, with a faint tooth that holds pigment. On this prepared ground, an artist has drawn, in fine ink lines, a divine figure: a Buddha, a bodhisattva, a wrathful protector, a great teacher. The figure is then filled with colour – not watercolour washes but layered applications of ground mineral pigments, dense and opaque, built up like thin plaster. Gold – real gold, powdered or leafed – covers the skin of Buddhas, the halos of saints, the fine decorative lines that trace jewellery, lotus petals, and flame aureoles. The result glows. It has a material presence that reproduction cannot capture: the blue is the blue of crushed stone, the red is the red of cinnabar ore, and the gold catches light differently at every angle. ...