Hommage to Saint John the Baptist 1912

This painting by Nicholas Roerich, Hommage to Saint John the Baptist, shimmers with flat planes of color. It's got this jagged mountain range in shades of fiery reds and blues set against an even deeper blue sky. I wonder what Roerich was thinking about when he was making this? The starkness of the landscape, the limited palette... it feels so direct. It's like he's trying to distill something essential about the landscape, maybe even about faith itself. Roerich’s brushstrokes are so deliberate, and the paint is applied thinly, allowing the texture of the surface to peek through. There's an almost theatrical quality to the way the light hits the peaks. It reminds me of the Hudson River School painters and their dramatic landscapes, but Roerich’s version is pared down, more symbolic. It is like he has taken an idea of the holy and expressed it visually, in an ongoing conversation with painters of the past.