In their art, Tibetans aimed at faithfully transmitting and preserving Buddhism as a spiritual discipline as they had learned it from earlier teachers. Each thangka painting was a small contribution to the larger cause of keeping Buddhism alive and radiant. In this third volume on Tibetan painting, David Jackson investigates painted portraits of early Tibetan teachers. Images of these eminent personages embodied Buddhist ideals in human form. In creating these depictions, Tibetan painters of the 12th through the 14th centuries imitated the artistic conventions developed in Pala- and Sensa-ruled eastern India (Bengal). This style, called Sharri, spread from India to many parts of Asia, but its classic Indian forms, delicate colors, and intricate decorative details were emulated most faithfully by the Tibetans.

In A Revolutionary Artist of Tibet author David Jackson focuses on the Khyenri style, the least known among the three major painting styles of Tibet, dating from the mid-fifteenth through the seventeenth century. The painting of Khyentse Chenmo, the founder of the Khyenri style who flourished from the 1450s to the 1490s, was significant for his radical rejection of the prevailing, classic Indic (especially Nepalese-inspired) styles with formal red backgrounds, enthusiastically replacing them with the intense greens and blues of Chinese landscapes. Khyentse was famed for his fine and realistic looking work, both as a painter and sculptor. His painting style has often been overlooked or misunderstood by scholars-sometimes misidentified as an early example of the Karma Gardri style - but it is a missing link in the history of Tibetan painting. The Khyenri style is now most closely linked with a small sub-school of the Sakya tradition, the Gongkarwa. The most important in-situ murals of the Khyenri style survive at the Gongkar Monastery in southern Tibet, south of Lhasa near the Gongkar airport. There we find murals by the hand of Khyentse Chenmo himself; many of them were covered by a layer of whitewash and thus escaped destruction during the Cultural Revolution. Jackson also brings to light several of Khyentse's paintings in museums outside Tibet, including some that have been unrecognized for over a century.

Though the Drigung Kagyu was one of the most prominent and powerful schools of Tibetan Buddhism during its early period (12th - 14th century), its art is still relatively poorly known, even among Tibetans. With its mother monastery destroyed twice, once in the late 13th century and again during the Great Cultural Revolution, much of the art was lost or dispersed. The iconography of the Drigung School is examined with regard to its three main periods - early, middle, and late - in combination with the distinctive influences of the Sharri, Khyenri, and Driri styles. The book aims elucidate to the painting traditions of the Drigung Kagyu School and investigate lineage depictions and methods of dating, while referring to previously overlooked Tibetan sources, both ancient and modern. The publication and related exhibition also explores the beneficial quality ascribed to the works of art and the elements they contain.