Bum-Erdeni 1947

Here's Nicholas Roerich's Bum-Erdeni, painted with tempera on canvas. The colors—sunset pink, blood orange, shades of violet—give me this apocalyptic feeling. Like this battle has been raging forever, and the stakes are cosmically high. Look at that knight and his rearing steed painted flat, like an icon, and the dragon seems to emerge out of a mountain of dark matter! I think Roerich was channeling some serious anxieties about good and evil in his work here. I can imagine him mixing up the tempera, working at the canvas, trying to figure out just how to give form to his inner world, and maybe even finding that the painting has a life of its own. When I look at the painting I can feel a deep connection with artists of the past. And like me, he was probably moved by earlier painters, the symbolic painters, whose canvases also glow with color, and tell of unseen worlds.