Buddha in the Golden Field

This is the quietest painting in the studio. Where the mural panels are dense with ornament, this one holds a single face and lets everything else fall away into colour.

The ground is worked in vertical strokes of saffron, amber and olive — dragged rather than blended, so the canvas weave shows through and the field behind the head reads as warm moving light rather than flat paint. Against it the face is almost bone-white, drawn with the barest contour: two closed eyes as long curved lines, a straight nose, a mouth that only just turns up.

The hair is built from dozens of tiny painted spirals, each one a separate snail-shell curl — the traditional attribute of the Buddha, here rendered patiently by hand across the whole crown and up into the ushnisha. The urna between the brows is a single spiral in gold.

Two haloes surround the head: an inner ring of soft flame-orange and an outer chain of round golden beads, painted large so that from across a room the whole silhouette reads as one lamp. Below the chin a lotus opens in pale gold, its petals catching the brightest light in the painting.