River Chandra 1932

Nicholas Roerich must have made this painting, River Chandra, with thin paint. You can see the weave of the canvas everywhere, like the underpainting is the actual painting! I imagine Roerich standing before the mountains, trying to capture their monumentality with a limited palette of purples and blues. Painting outside is hard! The light changes every second. There’s a real flattening of space here, a kind of dreamlike compression, that reminds me of early Renaissance painting. See how the peaks and valleys of the mountains become almost decorative? Roerich wasn’t going for realism. He saw those mountains, but they became an occasion to explore something more emotional and spiritual. Painters, we’re all looking at each other, even across time, trying to figure out how to make a feeling visible.