Tashi Gurung was a farmer. He grew up in Lo Manthang, the walled capital of the former Kingdom of Lo, closed to outsiders until 1992 — and had no exposure to Tibetan Buddhist painting until he was twenty.
In 1999 he joined the team restoring the five-hundred-year-old murals of the Jampa and Thupchen gompas. The project trained local Loba people rather than importing specialists, and his certificate — signed by the chief conservator and by the King of Mustang — records excellent marks in consolidation, cleaning and retouching. Each winter he travelled to Kathmandu to study painting and iconography under the master thangka painter Mukti Singh Thapa, three months at a time, across five years.
He begins with the cloth: cotton stretched on a wooden frame, sized with yak-hide glue, gessoed with white clay, dried in the sun, then polished with a stone until the surface will take a line. The pigments are ground from semiprecious stones — azurite, malachite, orpiment, cinnabar, lapis lazuli — milled to powder over three months. Some works carry 24-carat gold, and a single thangka can take months.
“In Nepal, no one knows how to do this, so we have to learn,” he told The New York Times in 2013 — the only painter quoted among a team of thirty-five.
Read Tashi’s full story — the four-day ride to Lo Manthang, and the murals that taught him to paint.
