Page 21 - Tibetan Thangka Painting Methodsand Mat, Jackson

Completed canvas ready on stretcher.

Inner Frame Materials
together on all sides he tied the loose end to the same
Artists in Lhasa sometimes gathered bamboo canes corner from which he had begun. Then he went around
for use in making inner stretcher frames from the the stretcher again, pulling each loop to gather any
bamboo groves of the Norbu-lingka, the Dalai Lama's excess slack and taking care not to let the cloth and
summer palace. If the artists could not get the thin inner frame be pulled out of alignment. When he again
canes, they could prepare suitable splints by splitting reached the end, he retied the cord tightly at the corner.
and whittling down larger and thicker pieces of bamboo.
In mountainous parts of Tibet where bamboo did not
grow the artists used straight sticks from various trees.
Newly cut sticks, being more pliant, were preferred to
old wood. Larger thangkas were often too long for a
single small stick to extend the full length of the cloth.
In such cases the artists sometimes tied two or three
small sticks together at their ends, forming a line that
ran the full length of the long edges of the cloth.

Tying the Inner Frame Within the Stretcher
Once the inner frame had been completed it was
placed within the outer stretcher frame and lashed to it.
For this the painter took a strong and very long, non-
stretching cord, and knotted one end of it to one of the
projecting corners of the outer stretcher. Then he began
to work his way around the stretcher, looping the cord
at regular intervals around the outer stretcher and
passing it through the gaps between the inner frame and
the cloth. After the stretcher and inner frame were tied Detail of a comer of a stretcher.

THE STRETCHER 17