Voldemort's Wand Glowing Green Beside a Snake — Print & Oil Painting

At the top of the panel a wand tip goes off like a struck match. White at the core, green at its edge, with fine rays shooting to the corners and a scatter of soft round lights, gold and white and a single red, floating in the dark around it. Everything below is lit by that one event.

The wand itself is a surprise. Not a turned and polished stick but a length of raw branch, forked near the top, with thin twigs still coming off it. It is held upright by a hand entering from the bottom of the frame, the fingers long and very thin, the skin lit green where the light reaches and swallowed to black where it does not.

A snake fills the right half. Its head is raised almost to the height of the wand and turned up towards the flare, jaws slightly parted, the brow heavily ridged and the eye a small pale gleam, while the body loops away behind the hand in one dark curve. Wand and serpent are given equal weight in the composition, which is the entire argument of the picture.

Green does all the work here, and it is the particular green this story keeps for its worst moments. The rest of the canvas is close to black with a slow bloom of deeper green behind the two shapes, and nothing is described that does not have to be. From our Harry Potter collection. For the same colour laid over a human face, see the portrait in green mist, and for the night all of this is moving towards, the burning courtyard.