Kathmandu, July 31 -- The more you look, the more there is to see in Shankar Kumar Joshi's and Sankha Narayan Shrestha's Paubha paintings - such is the intricacy and attention to detail that the art form requires and that these two artists are able to supply.

At first viewing, the paintings feature a cast of religious characters familiar to the run-of-the-mill Nepali viewer, as they were to me, images that are unmistakably of Buddha, Ganesh or Bhairav. But these depictions of the deities are most unlike the commonplace ones.

As both artists said many times in the detailed tour of the exhibition they enthusiastically gave, "There are endless myths and stories behind these forms; even we are always learning something or other" - a stateme...