Dzong at evening 1924

Nicholas Roerich painted "Dzong at Evening" with what looks like tempera or gouache, maybe, and a restricted palette of blues and whites and a touch of brown. I imagine him trying to capture the stillness and the feeling of the high mountains. You know, painting mountains is a challenge, it's hard to give them scale and presence. Roerich simplifies the forms, almost like geometric shapes, and that helps give them solidity. I see him building up the layers, one on top of the other, trying to find the right balance between detail and abstraction. The blue is so intense, and the way he's used light and shadow gives the scene a dreamlike quality. It is a painting about a place, but it's also about a feeling, a mood. Roerich has something in common with artists like Lawren Harris, another painter who stylized mountains into simplified shapes. It makes me think about how we see landscapes, how we turn them into symbols of something larger than ourselves.