Slavic land 1943

Nicholas Roerich made this landscape, Slavic Land, with oil on canvas sometime in the early 20th century. It has this beautiful, almost theatrical quality with its archway framing the distant hills. You can sense the careful layering and smoothing of the paint; it's applied thinly to achieve a smooth, almost translucent effect. The texture is subdued. Roerich favours clear, well-defined shapes and colour blocks over impasto or visible brushstrokes. The palette of blues and ochres lends a dreamlike, almost otherworldly quality, as if the scene exists not so much in a specific place but in the realm of memory or imagination. I find myself drawn to the way the colours shift and blend in the sky, from a golden yellow at the horizon to the cerulean blue above. I am reminded of the symbolic landscapes of Puvis de Chavannes. Both sought to capture something universal about the human experience in relation to the natural world. In the end, artmaking is a conversation that never really ends.