Father Frost 1912

Nicholas Roerich painted "Father Frost" with gouache, tempera, and gold paint on cardboard. I can only imagine Roerich layering these colors, one on top of the other, as the figure of Father Frost slowly came into being on the card, like a photographic image emerging in the darkroom. What a task to conjure an icon, a god, an idea of this figure, one mark at a time. I love how his beard is made of straight vertical lines and his face is just a few quick daubs of color. Looking at this, I am reminded of other artists who found folk art to be a big inspiration for a new kind of art, like Marsden Hartley, for example. These artists are in conversation across time, one constantly inspiring the other, and opening up space for creativity! In this painting, there's something ancient and utterly new, that dances between old and new worlds, between abstraction and figuration, certainty and ambiguity.