Mountain landscape 1933

Nicholas Roerich made this mountain landscape with pencil on paper. I can just picture Roerich quickly sketching these mountains. The peaks feel so immediate and alive. I love to imagine the artist there on the spot, trying to capture the feeling of being dwarfed by this enormous vista. I bet he struggled! Isn’t that always the way? Roerich's lines are kind of scratchy, right? Like he's feeling his way through the subject. He almost dares to capture the vastness of the scene with such simple gestures. You can see where he went over the lines again and again, building up the shapes, figuring out how to suggest form and depth. It makes me think about how drawing is such a direct line to an artist's thought process; a record of their looking and feeling, even more so than a painting sometimes. It's like a conversation between the artist and the mountains, each influencing the other.