Untitled 1935

Nicholas Roerich painted these dreamy hills with what looks like gouache. I can imagine him gently coaxing these forms into being, building them up through thin washes of color. What a lovely palette! Mauves, pinks, tangerines, and blues gently layered to create a sense of depth and distance, like gazing through a heat haze. Look at the ochre lines in the foreground, glowing as if the sun is just about to come up. I think that Roerich was trying to distill the essence of a place, its mood rather than its physical details. You see, artists often want to capture a feeling, a memory, a fleeting moment, and so they make marks to trace their existence in the world, and in doing so they connect us to those places, to their own experience, and to each other.