Paintings Fine Art

Nathdwara, Lhasa, Moscow, Oaxaca. The faithful in each paint what they cannot say aloud, and the walls of the world fill up with pictures.

Paintings run from Tibetan thangkas and painted tsakli initiation cards to Chinese calligraphy scrolls, ancestor portrait scrolls and the Taoist shaman’s scrolls of the Yao people of southern China. From Rajasthan come pichvai, the cloth temple hangings of the Nathdwara school painted with Krishna as Shrinathji; from Russia, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century icons in silver and brass covers; from Mexico, nineteenth-century retablos on tin. Cultural Revolution posters and lithographs, Mao in red and gold above marching workers, record a very different faith. Japanese ink painting, Indian reverse glass and contemporary canvases from France, Spain, Mexico and the United States, including the work of Chicago painters Mark Westervelt and Brian Sindler, complete the picture.

Mineral pigment on cotton, gold leaf, ink on paper.

One scroll in a stairwell can change the temperature of a house.