Shayok, the eighth day 1925

Nicholas Roerich painted this landscape, Shayok, the eighth day, with tempera, sometime in the early to mid twentieth century. It’s like he’s building the landscape with slabs of color, laying down these ochre, grey and lilac tones like a mason builds a wall. Look at that incredible mauve mountain on the right, it’s so solid and imposing. Notice the paint is thin, washy in places, thick and opaque in others, giving the work a wonderful textural variation. The way the colours are laid down is quite blocky, like he's hewing the landscape out of raw pigment. This tension between flatness and depth, the solid mountain and the fluid, almost translucent sky gives the work its peculiar power. Roerich’s landscapes remind me a little of Milton Avery's color planes and his flattening of form. Like Avery, Roerich invites us to contemplate the emotional weight of color, to find harmony in what might first seem discordant. I always feel like that's what painting is: a conversation, an ongoing exchange of ideas.