Himalayas. Pink peaks. 1947

Nicholas Roerich gave us these Himalayas in paint, and with what feels like a kind of reverence. Look how he’s built up the forms with simple blocks of color. The paint isn’t trying to trick you into thinking you're looking at a real mountain. Instead, it’s laying down a feeling, a presence. The blues in the foreground are so intense, almost like looking into a deep, cold lake, which sets off the ethereal, pinkish glow of the peaks. There's a lovely tension between the solid geometry of the mountains and the almost dreamy quality of the light. I keep coming back to the way the paint is applied, those deliberate, almost architectural strokes. It reminds me a bit of some of the early Modernists, like Cézanne, who were also interested in reducing the world to its essential forms. But Roerich brings something else to the table—a spiritual dimension, a sense of the sublime that makes you feel small, but in a good way. Art is a conversation, after all.