Temple of Tripura Sundari 1932

Nicholas Roerich painted 'Temple of Tripura Sundari' using what looks like tempera, or maybe pastel. Roerich’s purplish blues and the snowy mountain peaks, which he loved to paint over and over, make me think about how repetition can be a kind of devotion. The temple itself is quite a solid geometrical structure, and then there's all this haziness around it. I can feel the push and pull between the earthly and the spiritual. Looking at this, I imagine Roerich in the Himalayas, trying to capture that specific light. I wonder if he mixed his colors intuitively, searching for the right tone to express the sublime, or did he have a more deliberate method? Roerich isn’t just painting a landscape, but a feeling, a connection to something bigger than himself. There are echoes of other landscape painters, like maybe Caspar David Friedrich, but with a mystic twist. Artists build on each other's visions, you know? They absorb, react, and transform. Each brushstroke is a tiny act of translation, turning the world into something new, something felt.