In 1933, Nicholas Roerich wrote an unusual and incredibly beautiful pictorial series “The Holy Mountains”. One of the works of this series is the picture “Shatrovaya mountain”. Like many of Roerich’s works of the last two decades of his creative activity, Shatrovaya Gora was written in tempera. Everything in Roerich’s work is unusual and especially: both designs, painting techniques, and artistic images-symbols.
“Tent Mountain” – a picture of beautiful color combinations and color solutions. It seems that the mystery of the beautiful, the beauty of mysterious mountains and the heavenly spaces are embodied in front of us. Shadow dark dense sides of the mountains form a compositional series of contrasts. The black, all-consuming, oppressive shadow in the foreground of the canvas echoes the dark top of the Shatrovaya Hill. All this supports the artistic rhythm, builds the harmony of color, light and shadow ratios. The boundaries of the mountains are clearly outlined.
The silhouettes of the mountains seem to be fanned by a soft, fragile luminous mist, reminiscent of pale blue gentle clouds. Pale blue gaps enhance the motive of contrast, adding the effect of elusive ghostly matter.
We are attracted by a similar combination of airy lungs of intangible, almost ephemeral structures and strict steep mountain peaks. The images of the mountains resemble impermeable majestic holy peaks, which can be found only in a special time, when the sunlight breaks up into many thin rare shades. Each mountain peak is a beautiful pictorial motif collected from scattered particles.
Roerich’s canvas “Shatrovaya Gora” is replete with bright open flowers, various colorful transitions that resemble a complex futuristic landscape. The picture is characterized by a non-overloaded figurative row, but the combination of quiet simple forms with a special light and shade condition, when only the lighting modifies and restructures the surrounding images. Deep complex smoky transitions give a sense of mystery, half realness, sleep. When the entire world around resembles rather an illusion, all images seem so imaginary and half-real.
The sky is written with warmer pastel colors, which emphasizes the design of the air and the sun itself. In the space of the sky live different from the world of mountains and rocks of paint. Thus, in the picture there is a complex interweaving of moods, color spaces and motifs.
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