Nightingale the Robber 1910

Nicholas Roerich made Nightingale the Robber with paint on canvas, maybe tempera, and look at that strange palette of blues and greens. I wonder, did he start with the little hut on stilts? I imagine Roerich trying to think like this robber character. He's up in his treehouse, which looks so precarious, as if it could fall over any minute, keeping watch. I love the way the landscape is rolled out behind him like a scroll; everything is stylized into these gentle curving forms, which gives a feeling of timelessness. You can see how other painters like Gauguin and Matisse were interested in similar ideas, creating compositions based on memory and feeling rather than observed reality. There’s a tension here: the horror of the skulls on the hill versus the fairytale feeling of the landscape. Roerich’s kind of expression is a good reminder that art can embrace weirdness, and that paintings don’t always need to make sense to be affecting.