Girl 1913

This is a drawing by Nicholas Roerich, it's all about the gesture, about how to dress a figure and give it power! I really like the way he's put this figure together, bit by bit, each part seemingly considered separately. It's almost like he's designing a set of clothes, each piece an individual item, yet all coming together to make a figure. Look at those dangling cords on either side of her face and the decorative patterns on the fabrics. I can imagine Roerich working from the top down, starting with the headdress and then slowly, bit by bit, finding what should come next, almost like an exquisite corpse. I feel like this piece could really talk to the costume drawings of someone like Paul Klee. You know, those line-based drawings where the figure is all about its constituent parts. It reminds me that all artists are always in conversation, even across time. They feed into each other's practices in ways they don't even know. Painting embraces ambiguity, allowing for multiple readings over time.