at the mountains of madness
So fajrdrako's recent art post, and her resolution to post good art in the coming year, has inspired me to play at being art critic a little myself.
St. Panteleimon the Healer by Nicholas Roerich
I first came across the painter Nicholas Roerich due to a mention in H.P. Lovecraft's novella, At the Mountains of Madness. The first mention of the artist is a comparison between the weird dreamscapes of the Antartic and his artwork, and runs like this:
" The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring. Great barren peaks of mystery loomed up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope. [...] Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. "
Path to Tibet by Nicholas Roerich
One of the things I love most about Lovecraft is the way he mixes obscure-but-real references with completely invented ones. (This technique is so convincing that several versions of the Necronomicon are now actually sold. My personal favorite is the one written in pseudo-Arabic gibberish, with the phrases beginning to repeat every six pages or so.) It's one of the pleasures of Lovecraft, for me, that his bombastic, overwritten style contains these little gems, which are so easy to dig out and clean off (generally a good rubdown with Wikipedia will do the trick.) In this case, Roerich was a jewel buried in Lovecraft that has now become a favourite. He was a scholar, explorer, spiritual teacher, and even something of a politician. You can even read some of the journals he kept on his expeditions here. Y'know, if you read Russian.
Professor Roerich by Svetoslav Roerich
" Odd formations on slopes of highest mountains. Great low square blocks with exactly vertical sides, and rectangular lines of low, vertical ramparts, like the old Asian castles clinging to steep mountains in Roerich's paintings. "
The soft, blent colours of Roerich and the clarity and quality of light he uses lend an almost pastel-ish feel to his work, dream-like and peaceful. Yet something about them is indeed just a little creepy-- perhaps the overwhelming feeling of silence and solitude he manages to capture, or the strangely geometrical, angular shapes that seem slightly out of place when portrayed by his gentle palette.
" It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities of the higher mountain skyline - regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes, which Lake had mentioned in his messages, and which indeed justified his comparison with the dreamlike suggestions of primordial temple ruins, on cloudy Asian mountaintops so subtly and strangely painted by Roerich. There was indeed something hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthly continent of mountainous mystery. "
Buddhist Caves by Nicholas Roerich
St. Panteleimon the Healer by Nicholas Roerich
I first came across the painter Nicholas Roerich due to a mention in H.P. Lovecraft's novella, At the Mountains of Madness. The first mention of the artist is a comparison between the weird dreamscapes of the Antartic and his artwork, and runs like this:
" The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring. Great barren peaks of mystery loomed up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope. [...] Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. "
Path to Tibet by Nicholas Roerich
One of the things I love most about Lovecraft is the way he mixes obscure-but-real references with completely invented ones. (This technique is so convincing that several versions of the Necronomicon are now actually sold. My personal favorite is the one written in pseudo-Arabic gibberish, with the phrases beginning to repeat every six pages or so.) It's one of the pleasures of Lovecraft, for me, that his bombastic, overwritten style contains these little gems, which are so easy to dig out and clean off (generally a good rubdown with Wikipedia will do the trick.) In this case, Roerich was a jewel buried in Lovecraft that has now become a favourite. He was a scholar, explorer, spiritual teacher, and even something of a politician. You can even read some of the journals he kept on his expeditions here. Y'know, if you read Russian.
Professor Roerich by Svetoslav Roerich
" Odd formations on slopes of highest mountains. Great low square blocks with exactly vertical sides, and rectangular lines of low, vertical ramparts, like the old Asian castles clinging to steep mountains in Roerich's paintings. "
The soft, blent colours of Roerich and the clarity and quality of light he uses lend an almost pastel-ish feel to his work, dream-like and peaceful. Yet something about them is indeed just a little creepy-- perhaps the overwhelming feeling of silence and solitude he manages to capture, or the strangely geometrical, angular shapes that seem slightly out of place when portrayed by his gentle palette.
" It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities of the higher mountain skyline - regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes, which Lake had mentioned in his messages, and which indeed justified his comparison with the dreamlike suggestions of primordial temple ruins, on cloudy Asian mountaintops so subtly and strangely painted by Roerich. There was indeed something hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthly continent of mountainous mystery. "
Buddhist Caves by Nicholas Roerich