A Tribute to Gyankar Bajracharya, Shown for the First Time

The first painting I stopped at was a Shri Yantra. Red and gold, all those triangles folding inward toward one point in the middle. I hadn't met anyone yet or heard a single story about Gyankar Bajracharya, the man who made it. I just stood there a while because it was beautiful.

I found out later that the same piece, or one very close to it, sits in an archive of Newari tantric art that was put together years before this show. So it wasn't just me, and it wasn't just his family being proud. Someone with no stake in it had already decided his work was worth keeping, a decade ago.

This was MĀTAN Gallery's first exhibition. A tribute to the late Gyankar Bajracharya, made up entirely of paintings his family had kept at home, none of them shown in public until now.

Meeting the family

I got there before Meena didi. The gallery's owner is Pravakar's friend, and Pravakar is Gyankar's son, so it was Pravakar he introduced me to first. He was shy to start with. Once we got onto the paintings themselves he loosened up and didn't really stop.

His mother was there too. The second the conversation moved to her husband, you could hear it in her voice, that catch right before someone cries. I left it alone. She stayed near the paintings mostly, and some of what she was feeling she never said out loud, she didn't need to.

The room is small. One room, really. It suited the work better than some big white gallery would have.

His paintings don't match his life

If you only saw the paintings, you'd assume they came from some monk who spent fifty years alone on a hillside. The deities have that stillness, the kind that looks like it took a very long and very quiet sitting to get right.

He was not that.

Gyankar never had a teacher. Pravakar said this more than once, like he wanted to make sure I had it down. His father taught himself, mostly by reading scripture and working out how to turn what he read into a painting. And he drew on anything. If he saw a god in a temple he wanted to figure out, he'd sketch it on whatever was in his hand. A cigarette packet. A prawn cracker box. There's one of those in the show, an actual prawn box with his drawing on it.

The drawing thing got him thrown out of school in seventh grade. Not for causing trouble the normal way, but because he would not stop drawing, and the other kids kept crowding around his desk to watch instead of doing their work. He was already good enough, that young, to pull a whole classroom off task.

So, not a monk on a hillside. A restless kid who drew on his snack packaging and somehow still made work that looks like it came out of decades of silence. I keep turning that over.

He taught the way he lived

Pravakar picked up some of it from his father, but he told me straight that he can't do what his father did. I asked how Gyankar taught compared to the strict old master-and-apprentice way. Him and his mother more or less said the same thing: he wasn't strict at all. He'd show you how a thing was done and then leave you alone to figure the rest out yourself.

Some artists from Bhaktapur came by for the show, and they said a version of the same thing. To them he was like an older brother, the one you go to for advice. Not someone laying down rules from above. Just someone further down the road who was happy to tell you what he'd learned.

One more thing that surprised me. Paubha and Thangka paintings usually aren't signed. The old idea is that the painting is an offering, not a personal statement, so the painter stays anonymous. That's gone back centuries. 

However, Gyankar signed his, on the back. I didn't expect that, and I don't think most people would.

What his wife did

She didn't say much, and I wasn't going to make her. But one thing she told me I haven't stopped thinking about. When money was tight and they couldn't buy materials, she made the paints herself, ground and mixed the colors he needed. And she painted with him, filled in parts of the work by hand.

So some of the paintings on that wall have her in them too. Her name isn't on the back with his, but her hands are in the paint.

She also said he was a very gentle person. When NAFA gave him some award, he asked them to give it to somebody else instead.

The ones he never finished

There's more than one unfinished painting in there. Pravakar said several of his father's pieces are sitting in the gallery half done.

One of them held me longer than anything else in the room. Big canvas, and you can still see the pencil lines for a temple roof where the paint never got to. The deities lower down are fully done. The little card next to it says it's the last thing he was painting before he passed away. You can see the exact spot where the color stops and it goes back to being a sketch.

Pravakar is heavy about these. Some of it is just that they're unfinished. But he also told me he doesn't think he can finish them the way his father would have, or ever paint at that level himself. He can see exactly how good his father was, which is also how he knows exactly what's gone.

Why now

There was no big plan behind this. Pravakar's friend, Manish Dhoju opened a gallery and talked him into finally showing his father's work to people who weren't family. That's the whole reason.

I was in that room for maybe an hour. A woman whose voice broke the second her husband came up. A son who started out too shy to talk and then couldn't stop. Bhaktapur painters calling a self-taught man their elder brother. And a red Shri Yantra that a stranger had thought worth archiving years ago. It didn't feel like a gallery opening. It felt like they'd let me sit in on something that was really theirs.