Art
Festival Masks
Festival masks are some of the most unique and interesting elements of the religious and secular life in the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau. They are worn by Cham dancers who perform extremely colourful theatrical dances choreographed for important religious festivals, accompanied by music played by monks using traditional Tibetan music instruments.
The masks come in different shapes and styles, representing different characters that portray good and evil and an array of deities in Tibetan Buddhism. The dancers wearing the masks take part in theatrical dances are often trained for many years before they can take part in the shows. The bigger and more important the festival is, the more experienced and prominent the dancers are.
The masks are carved and painted by hand, using local woods. The process takes a month on average, depending on the mask size. It is a very complicated job that requires extreme talent and attention to details. The character faces must be perfect and authentic for a mask to be used in a festival dance. There is no room for compromise, one mistake and the mask has to be disposed.
Masks are also important in the Himalayan secular too; people often hang them in their home, and dedicate the best spot in the house for that. It is such a mesmerising experience to visit a Himalayan house and seeing a whole wall filled with festival masks of all colours, shapes and sizes.
Unfortunately, due to the increasing tourist footfall in the region, people who are looking for a quick buck started selling cheap quality masks machine carved or mass produced from untraditional materials (like mud and ash) in neighbouring countries to sell them to tourists. It can be pretty hard for the unexperienced eye to tell if the mask is authentic or not, especially when it is covered with multiple layers of paint.
Sadly, making traditional masks is a dying craft, especially with the diminishing importance of religion in people’s lives, and the increasing availability of cheap and mass-produced masks. However, it is still possible to get one’s hands on authentic pieces in the remote parts of Bhutan.
Mandalas
Mandalas (also known as yantras) are some of the most unique and interesting forms of art in the whole wide world. They are associated with Tibetan Buddhism, but they are known to be used in Hinduism too. They are traditionally used by monks and devotees as a focusing subject during meditation.
Mandalas are geometric paintings that are filled with extremely intricate details, and they require weeks, and sometimes months, of highly focused and attentive hard work to be completed. They were traditionally painted by devotee artist for monasteries and feudal lords; being extremely time consuming very labour intensive, made them off-limits for lay people.
The most known forms of mandalas to the world are those made of coloured sands by Tibetan monks, a process that take some takes weeks of intensive work, only to be destroyed after completion to signify the impermanence of life.
However, in the last few decades, they started being produced commercially, especially with the increasing influx of tourists in the Himalaya region. Unfortunately, this led to abundance of low-quality mandalas that are made hastily to make a quick buck.
Retailers and tourist guides who are involved in these quick buck swindles rely on the fact that most tourists lack the basic knowledge to tell a good mandala from a low-quality one. However, it doesn’t need an expert eye to tell, a good quality mandala should have a lot of intricate details across the canvas, and should also be made of multiple layers of paint on top of each other, topped by an embossed layer of golden lines.
Normally, a good mandala painter would create a few layers of mono and multi colour basis on the canvas, before they even start with the main theme.
The themes generally revolve around the Buddha, life and death, and certain gods and deities that are centric to Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism, like Vajrakilaya and Vishnu.
Most mandalas consist of a circular body surrounded by four doors (often T-shaped). This is meant to symbolise a stupa (Buddhist temple) from above. It also meant to represent the entire universe in some ways.
Mandalas are generally divided into natural pigments mandalas and commercial paints mandalas. The natural pigments are made from natural organic matter, mostly soil and rocks. It is a labour intensive and time-consuming process, as the artist needs to wonder around mountains and reivers to collect the basis for their colours, then the colours need to be treated and ferment for weeks.
Most natural pigments mandalas are painted on traditional handwoven canvas. However, it is possible for artists to mix and match. Natural pigment mandalas are meant to last for centuries, and the colours shouldn’t fade. However, commercial colours mandalas are more vibrant and colourful.