Tibetannet

What makes mural art provocative is the value that it engenders and intuitive message that it delivers to the onlooker.

We can ask ourselves questions such as, why in his masterpiece “Path to Kailas” did Roerich choose to color the sky and valley below a shade of green slightly off from the precise color jade? Or we could ask ourselves questions like why does the rock in the foreground with some inscriptions only lay partially in the pane of view while the bottom half is left “unconcluded”?

Yet in actuality, Roerich himself may have been compelled in the moment of creation to use the jade color for no other reason than that it just simply felt right. It certainly does feel right as you look onto this mural, with staggering peaks in the background. One of those is suggestively a “version” of Mount Kailas, perhaps the contours impression on one’s inner world.  

As a peak understood to be at the center of the world in the eyes of many and in the cosmological view of south Asian people who thrive in the valleys far below to which its mighty glacial and snow melt waters work their way, it's clear to all at first site when seeing this peak that it is something special and legendary to all of humanity.

In that day in age, preciously in the 1930s for a Russian expedition adventurists to even have ventured as far as the plateaus of Tibet was an accomplishment in itself. Yet in fact, he worked his way across significant portions of this landscape to its hidden corners and faraway places. The sense of the wild, the untamed and the remote one could gain by months of horseback journeying in such a land surely would allow for one to express with great emotional depths ideas, feelings and philosophies from the tip of a paintbrush, and that seems to be precisely what he did.

When Roerich finally arrived to the vicinity of Mount Kailas in approx. 1932 he made a journal log depicting the people of the local place explaining that “The camp is full of excitement. We are approaching the Yarlung Zangbo, the very one which has its source in the sacred Mansaravar. Already files of pilgrims are encountered; they are gloomy and ragged, and carry spears. Amidst rocks and sand, lilac and purple, lies the Yarlung Zangbo. In May the water is not yet completely risen. The water line on the banks shows to what extent the river rises in June with the snow thaw and rains.

The mystery, the question, and the forthcoming discoveries all hinted out in this excerpt from his diary in many ways are embodied by the color choice in this mural, almost hinting at the sacred Lake and sky from which its sacred waters ultimately originated. In his own way, Roerich too was a pilgrim searching for truth in the world and leaving aspects of his discoveries behind for future generations. “Path to Kailas” is currently on display at the Nicholas Roerich museum in New York City.