Bogdo-Ul 1927

Nicholas Roerich made Bogdo-Ul with paint on canvas, somewhere, sometime, maybe quickly, in Russia. It's got this feeling of being direct. The texture looks scrubbed, and I can almost feel the push and pull of the brush, you know? Like the way the white paint sort of nervously models the mountain, and the whole pale violet ground that feels calm at the bottom. What was he thinking? Maybe about simplification. I mean, the blue outline flattens the mountain into an almost cartoon shape, while the white impasto tries to sculpt it. I can imagine Roerich looking back at Cezanne, at the way he flattened and faceted space, and also forward to Guston, who took landscape and made it into, like, body parts. Anyway, whatever it is, painting is always a kind of conversation like that. A back and forth across time. It keeps going, because there's never one way to describe a mountain, or a feeling, you know?