Serenity
Enshrined: Tibetan Master Artist
TINLEY CHOJOR
by Ross Rice
...Warm primary color tones touched off by the skylight,
blues greens and mellow reds, with saffron orange-yellows
in shapes suggesting a peaceful inter-connectedness, a timeless
continuation. This is Tinley Chojor’s art, and it’s
really quite safe to say that nobody in the world (as we know
it) does it better.
Back in 1645, the Fifth Dalai Lama wanted to have the best
in the land helping to build the Potala, the world-famous
Buddhist palace in Lhasa. Word was spread, artists and artisans
gathered, and when the best was selected, Tinley’s ancestors
(from the region of A Lhagyari, southeast of Lhasa) were among
the select group of artists, forming what Tinley refers to
as the “Zong Jong”, a community (or guild) which
lasted seven generations, until 1959.
Tinley Chojor was born in Lhasa around 1935, the seventh-generation
lineage holder of this renowned family of Tibetan artisans,
and showed early aptitude for the family trade, so his father
started his training at home at eight years. In 1942, he was
one of twenty-seven children selected by the Tibetan government
to study and maintain Tibet’s artistic culture. At the
same time, he started his education at the Tibetan monastery,
which at that time was the single source of higher learning
available (pre-dating the secular systems imposed by the Chinese
regime). Memorization of Buddhist scripts went hand-in-hand
with brush and color techniques, blending the spiritual with
the aesthetic. Tinley became an apprentice, working constantly
on projects all over Tibet, including The Potala, and eventually
The Jokang, Norbulingka, Ganden, Sera, Drepung, Nechung, and
Tsurphu Monasteries. CONTINUE...
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