Daenerys Targaryen Rides Drogon Through Red Skies — Print & Oil Painting

Four fifths of this canvas is one wing. Long black spines sweep in from the bottom left and cross the whole width of the picture in a set of near parallel diagonals, the membrane stretched between them painted in flat, almost dry passages of charcoal. The animal is not shown. Only the part of it she is sitting behind.

She occupies a small pocket of clear space in the upper right, and everything about the way she is painted is quiet: platinum hair braided back from the temples, a coat of dusty lavender-grey, a fine chain lying across the chest, the shoulders rolled forward and the head lowered so that the eyes are on something below the frame. No triumph anywhere in the pose.

Whatever red the picture has arrives through the wing rather than from above. Two or three ragged patches of it burn behind the membrane at the right and along the lower edge, the way a strong light shows through a hand held over it, and against a canvas otherwise built from smoke greys and near black those patches carry an unreasonable amount of weight.

Daenerys named her largest dragon for the khal she buried, and mounting him at all was a thing no living person in these stories had done. The painting withholds the spectacle of that entirely and gives you the passenger's view instead. It opens our Game of Thrones collection. The figure reaching up to her dragon above the sea takes the opposite decision and paints the whole animal.