Tibetan Painting

Tibetan Painting is almost exclusively devotional in nature.With the exception of decorative design, the paintings found in shrines, monasteries and in thangkas (wall hangings) always depict Buddhist themes.Early Tibetan painting was heavily influenced by the Buddhist cultures to the south, and in keeping with Indian style generally depicted Buddhist deities.
These usually followed stereotyped forms with a central Buddhist deity surrounded by smaller, lesser deities.Poised above the central figure was often a supreme Buddha figure of which the one below it was an emanation.
This Indian influence soon became subsumed under Tibetan development, though the underlying forms changed little.The depiction of Buddhist deities, for example,gave way to the depiction of revered Tibetan lamas or Indian spiritual teachers.
In many thangkas and wall frescoes, the central image of a lama is surrounded by incidents from the lama's life.In the case of some mandalas,these surrounding scenes might be replaced by images from the lineage of the particular religious order associated with the lama.
Chinese influence began to manifest itself more frequently in Tibetan painting from around the 15th century.The freer approach of Chinese landscape painting allowed some Tibetan artists to break free from some of the more formalised aspects of Tibetan religious art and employ landscape as a decorative motif in the context of a painting that celebrated a particular religious figure.This is not to say that Chinese art initiated a new movement in Tibetan art.
Thangkas are usually mounted on brocade and rolled up between two sticks making them eminently portable, essential in a land of nomads. Not so portable are the huge thangkas, the size of large buildings, which are unfurled every year during festivals.