Erdtree of Fire and Light — Print & Oil Painting

The image is overexposed and that is the point. Light coming off the tree has been allowed to blow out the whole centre of the frame, so the trunk vanishes into white, the branches nearest it lose their edges completely, and only towards the corners does anything resolve back into drawn form.

What resolves there is worth the wait. Pale bare wood, thousands of thin branches spreading right across the width, each carrying clusters of small burning gold points so that the canopy reads as embers rather than as leaves. There is no green anywhere in the picture.

A vertical shaft of harder light runs up the centre from the base, brighter than anything around it, and at the foot of that shaft sits the only dark object in the frame: a squat drum-shaped structure in silhouette, studded in courses, with a chain hanging off one side. It is the single piece of built work in an image otherwise made of light and timber.

Colour runs from white at the core through gold and amber to a cool blue-grey at the outer edges, where the branches finally read against something dark enough to hold them. It sits in our Elden Ring collection, and the same tree with a landscape and a horizon under it is the view from the ridge. After dark it becomes the blue and gold version.