Chenrezig thangka-quilt

I’ve been slow. Summer in Milan can have that effect as routines break down and everyone leaves for vacation. I actually finished my Chenrezig art quilt/thangka two weeks ago. Here it is:

Chenrezig art quilt thangka

This “thangka” is a unique combination of traditional and new, eastern and western techniques. I drew the figure of Chenrezig (that’s his Tibetan name. In Sanskrit, it’s Avalokiteshvara.) several years ago while studying thangka drawing in Sarnath, India with Alex Kocharov. Chenrezig embodies all the fully awakened compassion of the enlightened mind and is the deity closest to my heart. In China, he takes the feminine form of Kuan Yin. In Japan, he is Kannon. The Dalai Lama is a living manifestation of Chenrezig too.

I pieced this figure in the traditional Tibetan fashion, using pure silk satins and gold-patterned brocades from Varanasi. He’s seated on a deep blue and violet lotus, inspired by this traditional Tibetan poem found in Sogyal Rinpoche’s book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:

Avalokiteshvara is like the moon

Whose cool light puts out the burning fires of samsara

In its rays the night-flowering lotus of compassion

Opens wide its petals.

After the figure was pieced, the nontraditional aspects of this thangka began to emerge. I suggested the nimbus of glowing light around the body with a transparent metallic-effect synthetic organza, machine stitched with radiating lines. I cut the head nimbus from a beautifully patterned cotton scarf remnant purchased from the Etro designer outlet in Milan, Italy. Chenrezig’s immediate background is a deep, variegated, blue of hand-dyed (not by me but by a woman near Munich in Germany) cotton sateen, quilted in a pattern echoing the outlines of the form. Surrounding this central block are six quilted blocks of cotton fabric from the US. I arranged these to form horizontal bands of color reminiscent of some of the oldest Tibetan applique thangkas where sky and ground are represented by three graduated horizontal bands. The six sections also imply the six realms of sentient beings — the forms in which we can take birth, or the reactive filters through which we can see our experience and react to it. Narrow strips of red and white cotton separate these blocks as Chenrezig’s bodhicitta permeates the worlds. The sun and moon are quilted in the dark sky above.