Himalayas. Morning. 1941

Nicholas Roerich made this painting, Himalayas. Morning., with what looks like thinned oil or maybe tempera, and a brushy, washy technique. I can imagine him, almost meditatively layering washes of blues, building up these monumental mountains, one behind the other. What’s he thinking? Maybe not much, right? Just letting the paint do its thing, letting the mountain emerge, like a slow reveal. The paint application is so thin it’s almost like watercolor, the forms appearing soft, like a memory or a dream. Those hazy peaks, just barely touched with white, suggest something beyond the earthly. You can see this across his whole body of work, this spiritual quest, through the landscape. It makes me think about Agnes Martin, also looking for transcendence through a kind of reductive, repetitive gesture. Each artist inspires one another, reaching out through time, and it makes you wonder, what mountains are we all trying to climb?