Himalayas. Pink peak. 

Nicholas Roerich created this painting, Himalayas. Pink peak, in an unknown year, using tempera on cardboard. The painting's composition divides into horizontal bands, creating a receding landscape under a pale sky, evoking a sense of serene vastness. Roerich's brushstrokes are soft, blurring the distinctions between earth and sky. The use of tempera allows for a matte texture, emphasizing the ethereal quality of the scene. The dominant color scheme revolves around muted blues and purples, contrasted by the stark white peak that pierces the horizon. This contrast draws our eye upwards, towards the symbolic purity and inaccessibility of the mountain. The painting flattens perspective, reducing the mountains to simplified forms that oscillate between representation and abstraction. This technique aligns with the early twentieth-century spiritualist rejection of materialism, as the mountain becomes a signifier of higher consciousness. Through the formal qualities of color and simplified form, Roerich transforms the landscape into a meditation on transcendence.