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Karma Phuntsok
Born in Lhasa, Karma Phuntsok was a child when his
family fled Tibet in 1959, after the failed uprising
against the Chinese. Like 80,000 other refugees that
year, they followed His Holiness the Dalai Lama through
the Himalayas into exile. However humble their
beginnings, the Phuntsoks strove for comfort in their
new home, thankful to be free of the oppression they
experienced under Chinese rule, where citizens were
taught to revere Mao and despise the Dalai Lama. For ten
years, Karma enjoyed a formal education in Sikkim, India
through a system of refugee schools. He particularly
excelled at drawing and painting. Over the years, his
interest in art grew. True to his hard-working culture,
he took on many jobs with unsinkable enthusiasm before
he decided to earn a living as an artist. In 1973 he
began to study with a master Tibetan Thangka painter in
Nepal.
Working with diligence and
showing great promise, Karma lived with the master 24
hours a day. He learned the secrets of distemper
techniques, creating traditional mineral and organic
paints by collecting stones from far-off places,
grinding them by hand with a mortar and pestle.
He learned how to mix the
pigments with egg, to temper them with herbs and glue,
how to hem the silk or cotton canvases and string them
properly within a wooden frame. He learned how to prime
the canvases with an amalgam of rabbit-skin glue and
chalk, stretching them tight before ever lifting a brush
to the surface. His apprenticeship required that he
master not just the discipline of painting Tibetan
Buddhist deities, but also the iconometric principles
which underlie every Thangka composition. By 1974,
after an intense year-long apprenticeship, Karma became
a full-time professional thangka painter, and has been
ever since.
In 1978, while still living in
Nepal, Karma met his future wife Carol, and within a few
years they moved to Australia. This move unleashed
boundless creativity in Karma’s art, unveiling the
similarities between Aboriginal and Thangka styles.
Both traditions use mineral and organic pigments primed
with natural binders, both make elaborate use of
geometric patterns and both revolve around complex
imagery, to produce works of art loaded with allegory.
Through symbolism, artists of both Thangka and
Aboriginal styles employ metaphor to bring ancient myth
and ceremony to life. Moving to Australia proved richly
rewarding for Karma’s work, as he began to entwine
Tibetan artistic traditions with Aboriginal themes and
methods. His discovery and subsequent mastery of the
airbrush adds contemporary flair (and often humor) to
his distinct blend of ancient styles to create
masterpieces that are as dynamic and modern as they are
traditional and reverent.
Karma now lives with his wife and son in a charming
cottage in the rolling bushland north of Kyogle. The
only exception to solar power is the fuel he uses to
occasionally fire up the generator for his airbrush
compressor.
The dense forest visible from the
verdant clearing surrounding their home lays fertile
groundwork for the imagination that springs to life from
his canvas.
The art of Karma Phunstok is a
futuristic expression of an ancient craft, a
time-honored tradition interwoven with 21st
century inspiration, imbued with the power of the
distant past. His wealth of imagery and allegory flow
from the richness of his life experience: from a
childhood in Chinese-occupied Tibet, coming of age as a
refugee in India, an apprenticeship in Nepal, and his
love of the Australian outback. His work is
internationally acclaimed, and his paintings hang in
private and public collections and galleries on nearly
every continent.
Thangka
This art form originated in
Nepal, and was brought to Tibet around the 7th century.
The traditions established early on have been upheld.
Thangka is strictly iconographic, explicitly religious,
overflowing with symbolism and allegory. Nothing is
arbitrary, each image and every color in every
composition is chosen carefully by the artist. Each
piece is created as a tool for meditation, often
portraying the life of the Buddha, influential lamas,
deities and bodhisattvas destined for enlightenment.
All images and symbols exemplify the essence of Buddha;
traditional thangka art is an homage to Buddhist
culture, and the compositions are highly geometric and
reverential. Bodies, facial features, gestures, animals,
nature and ritualistic paraphernalia are all depicted on
a grid of angles and intersecting lines, as is the empty
space between objects. Thankga art is an offering of
sorts, a manifestation of divinity created to stimulate
the eye, the mind and the heart. Thangka can be
devotional and instructional tools, depicting legendary
moments in the lives of Buddha or other important Lamas,
or in the retelling of myth in general. Used during
ceremony, these stories told on canvas can provide a
focal point through which prayers or requests may be
made. The images portrayed in thangka art are created
as devotional aids to guide the viewer farther up the
path to enlightenment. Contemporary Thangka art
highlights the distinctiveness of Tibetan identity in
exile, often reinterpreting traditional Buddhist
iconography, requesting a closer look at hardline
Chinese policies which stifle the freedom to express
artistic creativity and to celebrate the religious
heritage of Tibet.
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