Mandala: Art that demands patience

Maryam Suleiman.

In the TV show House of Cards, there is a scene in which a group of monks work on a giant piece of work in the White House every single day for a month, painstakingly funnelling different colours of sand onto curved geometrical shapes based on circles on the canvas. Their eyes are inches away from their work and they work from dusk till dawn. Somewhere here in Nairobi, we find a young woman working on something similar, lost in her work - except she’s using paint, rather than sand. 

The brushes she is using are the tiniest she can find. She has already drawn the circles and patterns and is now filling them in millimeter by millimeter.