Tibetan Meditation
Promoting Harmonious Vibrations Between Eastern & Western Cultures
In 1993 I made my first trip to Nepal and Tibet. Of all the traveling I have done, the experiences during those six weeks has had the most profound influence on both my art work and my world view. Later, in 1999, I spent a month in India going from one refugee camp or Tibetan colony, to another, meeting Tibetan people, hearing their stories and learning about their life in exile.
On one occasion at the Tibetan colony at Mongod I met a young monk named Ngawang Tsultrim. He was a painter of Tibetan iconography and had a most harrowing story. He had left Tibet nine years before when he was eleven, with a little bit older friend, attempting to cross the Himalaya to exile in India; his friend was captured by border guards but he escaped and was eventually located at this Southern Indian colony.
The next year, 2000, Ngawang came to the United States as part of a rotating group of Tibetan monks, traveling the U.S., creating sand mandalas, playing traditional instruments, and chanting at various universities and for private groups.
I was in the middle of a new series of work about language and the evolution of the individual characters, from Greek to Ethiopian to Sanskrit, working with people from these different cultures to try and get the forms right; when I learned that Ngawang was in the country and not far from where I was living. I arranged some time with him to do a collaborative piece. This Tibetan Meditation painting is a result of that time we spent together.
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