[Buddha-l] Svetoslav Roerich--Buddhist painter

[Dante Rosati]

I've visited his museum up in the Columbia U area of New York, and the
paintings are even better in person. fanstastic color and lighting,
with cool mystico-theosophical-tibeto-himalayan-orientalist themes,
well worth a visit if possible. a very interesting character to be
sure.

On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 12:25 PM, jkirk<jkirk at spro.net> wrote:
>
> A friend just sent me a link to a big collection of his paintings
> online:
> http://www.roerich.ee/galnew/gallery.php?l=eng&g=
> The picture Gundla, 1934 is exquisite, as so many others are too.
>
> How about Gur -- The Seer, 1936?
>
> Of Russian descent,  he spent much of his life in S. Asia. Just
> recently, I learned from an Indian friend that he was married to
> a famous Indian actress, Devika Rani. You can see portraits of
> her by clicking on -d-.
>
> His mother, Helena, was a theosophist and spiritualist, she
> translated Mme Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine into Russian. Her
> husband, Nicholas, was a famous painter, Orientalist and
> traveler--before the revolution they went to India and lived in
> Manali, Panjab. The link on Nicholas R. per se is here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Roerich
> This wikipedia article about his father, N. R., seems to have
> been badly translated from what?--Russian?
>
> Svetoslav Roerich's styles remind me distantly of Georgia
> O'Keefe. (Perhaps she was influenced by his father N. Roerich's
> paintings, on tour around the US, in 1920. Or was that too early
> for her in the Southwest?) I've always loved S.R.'s work,
> although a few are sort of over the top literal.   He was
> eclectic in his references and influences--art nouveau, art deco,
> influenced by Christianity, Islam, Hinduism--was he a theosophist
> rather than a Buddhist? He could paint rocks and mountains like
> nobody else.
> The painting by his father shown here
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%22Song_of_Shambhala%22.jpg
> indicates that he was also influenced by one of his father's many
> styles.
>
> Joanna
>
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