Kayla's story:

I've been a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner since the mid-1980s. I had utilized some of the images of the sacred feminine such as Arya Tara in my personal paintings (many of which are displayed in this gallery shop), but when I showed them to my teachers they said to please use the iconic patterns, proportions, etc. My first teacher, Tara Tulku, told me it was OK to do or paint the images so long as I used the grid.

Then in the 1990s I began to do a series on Mary, deciding to study the traditional icons of her, her stance, clothing, colors. This was the closest I'd come to letting go of my personal vision and following the inspirational iconic guide of a tradition. I did however add some of my own interpretations: each having a rose placed with the figure, symbolizing her heart chakra or womb chakra or Christ or compassion and gave her faces from all over the world. This was very satisfying and I noticed that when I painted her feet in "Mary in the Garden" I felt heat radiate through my body and openness in my heart area. This reminded me of how much my winds [inner energies] were affected when painting the life size green Tara in correct proportion in 1991 for a Green Tara children's celebration in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

The way I began painting thangkas was that a fellow disciple of my second teacher, Denma Locho Rinpoche, was hunting for a thangka of her practice deity in Tibet, India, Nepal and the US, but could not find one that was well done or accurate. So she asked me to do one. It was extremely fierce and complex. I was lucky to have found a 2" x 3" grid of the yidam/deity in Cho-yang magazine and blew it up to a usable size. I also had access to a 17th century thangka of this yidam that was extremely well done in color and detail. So I could use it as a reference. All these conditions made it possible for me to do this work.

Also the painting style of my personal work had always been extremely complex, with bright colors, and made use of nontraditional (in the western sense) watercolor with opaque areas, intense color, and lots of detail. So it was very sympathetic to the Tibetan style of painting. While I was in India in 1992-93 the brothers who painted the Kalachakra Temple in Dharamsala told me it would be very easy for me to adapt my personal style to Tibetan thangka painting and it was.

I used the proportional grid for this first thangka (and for all subsequent) and drew the image free hand on top of it. These days many Tibetans use the "pounce" method of tracing paper with small holes to mark the outline, which I believe accounts for a more wooden image. Mine was very full of energy and life. It took me 6 months/600 hours to do the work and it really turned out well.

Then Professor Robert Thurman of Columbia University (a noted scholar of Tibetan Dharma and art, and a friend) saw that first thangka, which was a Yamantaka, and commissioned a thangka painting of a rare, hard to find image of a protector. This was even more of a challenge because it was in the black thangka style. I found that after familiarizing myself with the various iconic grids such as for short fierce deities, tall fierce deities, peaceful standing bodhisattvas, seated Buddhas, etc., that I could basically take a thangka that I knew was excellent and painted in a traditional way, and work backwards, finding out which iconic grid "fit" the painting perfectly and then drawing it on top of an enlarged color photocopy of the painting. Working from this was perhaps more difficult than from a linear drawing, but not impossible. I would then search my library for the best possible rendition of every aspect of the paintings to make sure the final product contained the most refined and beautiful details possible. In this case Ven. Thurman told me the finished product was a "masterpiece."

Those experiences motivated me to continue to take commissions for thangkas. Sometimes, however, a project is quite personal, such as a painting of the Buddha Teaching the Lotus Sutra. I read the sutra several times while helping my mother through the dying process. It sustained me at that time and I felt inspired to paint an image of the origin of that sutra.

When I am not painting thangkas I continue to explore my personal artistic vision of the sacred feminine. And naturally these days some thangka elements appear in my personal paintings.

My current thangka project is a commission of an image of Tsongkhapa and his disciples surrounded by Manjushri, Yamantaka and Palden Lhamo and her entourage. My patron asked me to produce an exact copy of an original thangka done in the "New Menri Style", which is very lifelike but also very complex, with special grids as a basis for the icons.