Arts & Crafts

Thangka painting, kira weaving, wood carving and the techniques behind Bhutan's most collectible art forms.

Bhutan's arts are not decoration. They are the visible language of a Vajrayana state, and each technique carries doctrinal meaning that a casual glance misses. Understanding a few of them changes what you are looking at when you walk into a monastery. <h2>Thangka painting</h2> A thangka is a painted or embroidered religious scroll, rendered on cotton or silk and rolled for storage and unrolled for display. Deity figures, mandalas and teaching diagrams are painted with mineral and vegetable pigments — ground minerals for the reds and blues, soot and plant extracts elsewhere — following strict iconometric rules that fix the proportion, posture, hand position and colour of every figure. The grid the painter works from is not arbitrary. If the proportions are wrong, the figure is not a slightly clumsy version of the deity but a different and incorrect entity, so the discipline is closer to calligraphy than to art school. Contemporary Bhutanese painters have largely abandoned strict adherence, which is a matter of ongoing debate inside the country. Look for: kulle (the outline brush, still used for the final contour line), the halos and throne backs built from concentric bands of gold,.