Girl Herder

Dedron’s paintings focus on the beauty of nature and the changing traditional Tibetan life and environment. She often depicts women and animals and uses warm, natural color palette with tones of Tibetan butter milk tea and cooler colors of sacred mani stones in the medium of mineral pigments on Tibetan paper or canvas. She does not employ any symbolic language of Tibetan Buddhist iconography but reveals her humanistic and environmental attitudes and worries about Tibetan culture.In this painting, a girl wearing a customary sheepskin garment raises her arms to herd sheep and yak, while a Tibetan antelope, an endangered species, runs at some distance. Further, behind rolling hills are traditional houses, and stylized clouds that may bring rain. The high horizon references the vastness of the Tibetan landscape. The unusually colored sky is its integral part and may imply dusk. Across the entire expanse of the painting various graffiti-like dotted images invoke rock carvings found throughout the land, some are not ancient but contemporary, which collectively represent traces of life in this wondrous environment.Notably, the girl has no nose nor mouth but prominent eyes. Dedron worked at an orphanage where she was introducing blind children to color through touch. The experience led her to emphasize her characters’ eyes, the distinctive element in her paintings.