Tristan's castle in Brittany 1912

Nicholas Roerich made this painting, Tristan's castle in Brittany, with watercolour, gouache, and tempera. Look at the dominant hues of blues and greens - it's a moody palette, right? It feels like a misty day in a fairytale. I can imagine Roerich working on this, layering the paint to build up those craggy cliffs and ancient stones. Maybe he mixed his colors right there on the paper, letting them blend and bleed into each other. He was probably thinking about stage design and how to create atmosphere. Notice how the brushstrokes almost feel like they’re mimicking the textures of the rocks and the sea. I like to think about how the way the artist handles their materials can really shape our experience of a place. And how that can be a conversation, across artworks and across time. It reminds me of a passage in Gaston Bachelard's book 'The Poetics of Space', where he writes about the way that a house, a castle, can become a repository of dreams and memories. Each artist contributes to an ongoing exchange of ideas.