Cervi della Ruota Aurea

It comes about in silence, the Cervi della Ruota Aurea wallpaper: a painting offered to the wall as an act of devotion rather than of decoration. I belong to the painterly tradition of Karma Gadri, the Himalayan school that joins symbolic rigour to the grace of mineral pigment, and in this scene I depict two kneeling deer, their slender necks bent in mirrored poses, their flanks dappled and their antlers barely indicated, turned towards each other around an eight-spoked dharma wheel, gilded, resting on an opened lotus from which fine ribbons hang. Below them a flowering meadow spreads in rounded tufts of grass and small five-petalled flowers; above, a pale sky holds a few scrolling clouds, stylised as only this school knows how.

The black ink outline, firm and sure, holds flat fields and soft shading: turquoise and jade for the ground, ochre and gold for the wheel, old rose, ivory and pearl grey for the deer's coats, touches of vermilion on the eyes, the hooves, the tips of the lotus. It is a centred, symmetrical composition that breathes — never crowded — and that close up reveals the fine hatching of the muscles, the golden filigree of the spokes, the petals counted one by one.

In my atelier, reproducing this wallpaper means returning the surface of the original painting intact: its full light, its balance, its quiet. It is a gesture of care that WallZad offers to those looking, in any room, for a wall able to hold both the eye and the thought.