ཐང་ཀ (Thangka)
Thangka painting is a sacred Tibetan Buddhist scroll painting tradition practiced in Sikkim, Ladakh, and the Tibetan Buddhist communities of Arunachal Pradesh and Darjeeling. A Thangka is a painted or embroidered hanging scroll depicting Buddhist deities, mandalas, cosmological maps, or lineage teachers, used as meditation aids, ritual objects, and vehicles for sacred visualization. The Sikkim tradition is one of the most technically sophisticated surviving lineages — characterized by precise iconometric proportion systems (thig-tse), mineral pigment preparation from lapis lazuli, malachite, vermilion, and gold, and an apprenticeship system within monastic institutions. A correctly executed Thangka is not an artwork — it is a consecrated object; the technical and ritual dimensions are inseparable.
Risk level: Endangered · Not inscribed as Indian element; Nepal Thangka painting inscribed 2024
A ritual art of Mathura and Vrindavan in which scenes from the life of Krishna are cut by hand with scissors into paper stencils and then made as temporary floor patterns with colored powders, or, in the jal sanjhi form, with colors…
A 19th-century school of small watercolors made in Patna, Bihar, for British and Indian patrons, showing everyday trades, festivals and portraits in a naturalistic mix of Mughal and European manners.
A ritual wall-painting tradition of the Deevaru community of Sagar and the Shimoga region of Karnataka.
Devotional painting from Mysuru, Karnataka, in which figures and ornaments are built up in relief with a gesso paste and then covered in gold leaf, against smooth flat colors on paper pasted over wood or cloth.
Miniature painting on handmade Wasli paper in the foothill town of Basohli, Jammu and Kashmir, in a bold style of flat saturated color, strong profiles and large eyes.
Etching of text and pictures on seasoned palm leaves with a sharp iron stylus, the lines then blackened with lampblack or kohl paste, as practiced in Odisha, above all in Raghurajpur village near Puri.
Pakistan truck art is the tradition of elaborately decorating commercial trucks, buses, and rickshaws with paintings, carved wood panels, metal chains, and reflective tape — creating the most densely decorated commercial vehicles in the…
Bark painting is the primary visual art form of Arnhem Land Aboriginal communities — paintings in natural ochre pigments on sheets of stringybark (Eucalyptus tetrodonta) that are stripped, flattened, heated, and prepared as a smooth…
Ochre — iron oxide mineral pigments ranging from yellow to red to purple — is the primary painting material of Aboriginal Australian visual culture, used in bark painting, body painting, rock art, and ceremony for at least 65,000 years.
Sand drawing (nalot in some Vanuatu languages) is the Vanuatu tradition of drawing complex geometric figures in sand or soft earth in a single continuous line — the finger never lifting from the surface from start to finish.
The multi-stage hand production of glazed terracotta mosaic tilework, originating in 10th-century Fez and considered the defining decorative element of Moroccan royal and religious architecture.
The Menri (མེན་རི) school is the canonical Lhasa court thangka painting tradition — the most systematized of Tibet's painting lineages, codified by Menthangpa Menla Dhondup in the 15th century and maintained as the official style of the…