Himalayas. Sunny contour of the mountains. 1939

Nicholas Roerich created this image of the Himalayas with cool blues and a sunny yellow outline. I like to imagine him up there in the mountains, squinting in the crisp, thin air, thinking about how to capture the scene. Did he start with the blue, maybe a wash? I can feel the thinness of the paint, how it might have run just a bit, creating those subtle gradations of colour. Then, like icing on a cake, those sunny yellow peaks, each one carefully placed, defining the edges. It’s so economical. It’s like he’s saying so much with so little. There's this tension between abstraction and representation, something so many painters wrestle with. It makes me think about Agnes Martin and her quiet, meditative landscapes, or even some of those early modernist mountain scenes. Roerich's work reminds us that every artist stands on the shoulders of giants, participating in this amazing, ongoing conversation about seeing and being in the world. It's a conversation that’s always open, always evolving.