I spent the last ten days writing an article about the history and cultural context of the thangkas I make. I’ve posted it on my new Squidoo page and hope that you’ll visit and read it. A warning: it’s quite long and you’re in no way obligated to finish it! But I’d love to hear your feedback and comments.
So little research has been done on the textile forms of thangkas — embroidered, woven, and appliqué. People often write me asking for resources for their studies, and I give them the same few articles by Newark Museum Curator, Valrae Reynolds and one by historian of Tibetan art, Michael Henss. There are a lot of books about Tibetan painting, but the appliqué tradition usually only gets a paragraph, if that, and a couple of images.
It’s confusing to try to figure out exactly how the form evolved in the interplay of Tibetan painting and religious authority with Chinese (and Mongolian and Tangut) politico-economic power and silk textile production. I’ve done my best to summarize the history, the cultural context, the social structures, and the techniques of Tibetan fabric thangkas — drawing on the limited writings I’ve found as well as my own experience “in the field.” I hope it’s useful. I hope more research will be done. I hope you’ll correct my mistakes. And I look forward to learning more and sharing it with you.
I also have a rather trivial technical question for any of you web gurus out there… or anyone else who has an opinion:
Appliqué in English comes from the French and is spelled with an accent mark over the final “e”. But when English-speaking people type a search term in Google (or wherever else they may type it), I’m guessing they normally do it without the accent marks. There are no accented letters on US keyboards, and the special-character keyboard shortcuts may or may not work in your browser. Actually, as far as I can tell, Google doesn’t make a distinction as to whether I enter “applique” like most Americans would or “appliqué” like most French people or sticklers for spelling would. Since I like to spell things correctly, I use the accent mark in most of my writing. But since I want to be sure anyone who searches for Tibetan applique will find me, I throw in some instances without the accent mark. Does it matter?
