Chiktan citadel in Himalayas 1932

Nicholas Roerich painted this incredible Himalayan citadel with what looks like tempera on board. Look at how the color vibrates, pure blues grinding against these ochre yellows. Everything in Roerich’s painting is about the surface, these chalky marks accumulate, describing form and volume through colour. The paint is opaque, built up in layers, and you can almost feel the texture of the board coming through. I keep coming back to how Roerich used the paint to build the architecture, it’s not just a picture of a building, but an object itself, as real in its way as the citadel, and the more I look, the more I think of Arthur Dove, another artist who knew how to make paint sing. What I love about art is this ongoing conversation, the way ideas bounce around and morph into new forms. There’s no final answer, just endless ways of seeing.