Beda the Preacher 1945

Nicholas Roerich’s ‘Beda the Preacher’ is a landscape of the mind, painted with tempera on canvas. The deep blues and reds evoke a kind of spiritual twilight. I can imagine Roerich layering these colors, building up the scene through thin washes. It's not about replicating a place, but about conjuring a feeling. Look at the figure of Beda, gazing upwards. He's like a stand-in for all of us, searching for answers in the cosmos. And those mountain peaks – they're so stylized, almost like stage props. The sun could be a divine spotlight! Roerich was into theosophy and mysticism, and you can feel that here. He's part of a lineage of painters like Hilma af Klint or Agnes Pelton, who were trying to make visible the invisible. They’re all in conversation, exploring the boundaries of what painting can do. We don’t look at this picture so much as feel it. It's about the unknown, the unspoken, the infinite possibilities of belief.