Rohtang Pass 1931

Nicholas Roerich made this watercolor painting of the Rohtang Pass, in the Himalayas. It's all about the cool blues and whites, right? I imagine Roerich out there, feeling the crisp mountain air, trying to capture the vastness and the quiet. He's laying down these washes of color, one after the other, building up the peaks and the valleys. There's a real stillness in this painting. The way the light hits the snow, you can almost feel the cold. I bet he was thinking about the spiritual power of nature, the kind of awe that makes you feel tiny, but also connected to something bigger. He’s part of this tradition of landscape painters who are chasing after something that you can never quite catch, right? But that striving, that act of painting, it's like a meditation, a way of understanding the world, and our place in it. Roerich’s paintings create their own space and invite us to contemplate the transient beauty of the world.