Procopius the Righteous removes a cloud of stone from the Great Ustyug 1913

Nicholas Roerich drew "Procopius the Righteous removes a cloud of stone from the Great Ustyug" and, well, isn't that a thing? It is this otherworldly landscape rendered in graphite, where the sky feels both heavy and luminous. You can almost feel the grit of the pencil on paper, like a whisper of the artist's hand moving across the surface. I can't help but imagine Roerich standing there, squinting into the landscape, trying to capture the weight of the clouds and the stillness of the earth. It's interesting that he chose a pencil, isn’t it? How the choice of medium, its limitations and possibilities, shapes how we see and think about the world. The softness of the graphite gives the scene a dreamy quality, a sense of something both present and just out of reach. It makes me think about other artists who’ve tried to capture the sublime, like Turner or maybe even Hilma af Klint. There's a shared desire to grasp something beyond the visible, to give form to the unnamable.