Thangka Painting & Newar Craft Workshop

Overview

Patan has been a city of metalworkers, woodcarvers and painters for a thousand years, and it still is — the workshops are working businesses on ordinary streets, not heritage displays.

This is six days at a bench with a thangka master, plus half-days with a bronze caster and a woodcarver. You leave with a finished painting.

The grid

Every thangka begins with an iconometric grid. The proportions of a deity's body are prescribed — the width of the face in finger-units, the position of the eyes, the span of the shoulders — and the painter constructs rather than invents.

This is why people who cannot draw manage perfectly well here. What the week asks for is patience and precision.

Pigment and gold

The colours are mineral: malachite for green, azurite for blue, cinnabar for red, ground by hand and bound with hide glue. They are laid in a fixed order, flat first and then shaded.

Gold goes on last, drawn in line and then burnished with an agate stylus until it lifts off the surface. The face is painted at the very end.

The other trades

A half day in a lost-wax foundry: a wax model is clay-coated, the wax melted out, bronze poured into the void, the mould broken to release the piece. Every casting destroys its own mould, so every piece is unique. Patan has been doing this since the Licchavi period.

Then a woodcarving workshop, where the struts and lattice windows you have been photographing all week get made.

Best season

September to November and February to May. The workshops are unheated and Kathmandu's winter mornings are cold to sit still in for six hours. The monsoon is workable — this is indoor work — but humid.