Monhegan (study) 1922

Nicholas Roerich made this study of Monhegan with pencil, and you can almost feel the wind coming off the sea. Look at the marks—they aren’t about detail, they’re about sensation, about an experience of place. The texture created by the hatching gives the rocks a solid, weighty feel, while the sky is all lightness and movement. See that single, almost cartoonish spiral up at the top left? It’s such a simple gesture, but it completely opens up the space of the drawing. It’s like a thought bubble, or a visual echo of the wind’s howling. Roerich's later paintings often have this ethereal quality, this sense of something just beyond our grasp. But even in this simple sketch, you can see him grappling with how to capture the invisible forces that shape the world around us. Think of Marsden Hartley, another artist drawn to Monhegan, each finding their own language to describe its rugged beauty. It shows how art's always a conversation, a search for new ways of seeing.