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Mr. Sherpa grew up in Kathmandu and was trained in thangka painting, which depicts Buddhist deities and mythological scenes.

In 1974, Ringgold painted bright geometries inspired by African Kuba cloth on narrow canvases and then, looking to Tibetan thangka, extended them top and bottom with — apparently — pieces of ersatz tourist blankets, sewn and appliquéd by her mother.

Look at the Cleveland Museum of Art, whose recent acclaimed show “Stories From Storage” absorbed hundreds of rarely displayed objects — medieval illustrations of plague saints, Tibetan thangka paintings, animal figurines from interwar Vienna — into a chorus of new meanings.

Dzekyid’s well-built house in Jangdam village has a hall filled with Buddhist scriptures and Thangka paintings, and a row of prayer wheels for his religious 76-year-old father, Tenzin, to spin twice a day.

But it wasn’t until I took a thangka painting class in a quaint upstairs studio in Kathmandu, surrounded by professionals creating the Tibetan Buddhist paintings, that I realized: elephants were on my mind.