Last winter I spent two weeks in Patan watching the first lines appear on a prepared cotton ground. The painter did not begin with an image. He began with a centre point, a compass, and a sequence of boundaries that made every later colour answer to the one before it.
The centre is a measure, not a symbol
At the edge, the charnel-ground register keeps the palace from floating into abstraction. Vermilion holds the west, malachite the north, yellow the south, and kaolin white the east; each quadrant is a position in a diagram, not a mood. Gold arrives last, thin enough to let the mineral surface breathe.