Beneficial herbs (Vasilisa the Wise) 1941

Nicholas Roerich painted "Beneficial Herbs (Vasilisa the Wise)" with tempera, and you can really see how the colours become part of the surface. There's something about the flatness of the colour fields that feels intentional, like a choice to simplify and distil the image down to its barest elements. Look at how the figure almost blends into the landscape, a soft red shape among the greens and blues. Roerich isn't trying to trick you into thinking this is real, it’s more like a stage set, a symbolic space. The hills roll into one another like the backgrounds in Piero della Francesca’s paintings, and this reductive approach gives the painting a dreamlike quality. It makes me think about Hilma af Klint, another artist who was reaching for a deeper spiritual reality through art, even though their paintings look nothing alike. Both were tuned into something beyond the surface of things, searching for the mystical in the mundane. Art is just that, an ongoing conversation across time.