The Eye of Sauron Blazing Above Barad-dûr's Fiery Sky — Print & Oil Painting

The fire in this picture is not in the eye. It is in the cloud. The entire upper half of the canvas is a churning ceiling of orange and scarlet, lit from within and boiling outward from a flare at the right edge, and against all of that the burning mark on the tower is comparatively small and comparatively calm. The sky is the furnace and the eye is only the pilot light.

The tower itself is a needle. It rises from the centre of the canvas as a slim dark shaft with a slight taper, ribbed with a few horizontal bands, splitting at the summit into two short prongs that hold the glowing ellipse between them. It is given no mass, no buttressing and no visible base, and at this scale it is thinner than the mountains it stands among.

Two climates have been stacked one on the other. Below the tower the land is a range of black volcanic peaks, hard-edged, unlit and cold, running back in overlapping wedges to a bank of pale grey cloud along the very bottom edge. Above it everything is heat. The seam between the two runs straight across the middle of the picture and nothing crosses it.

The handling is soft everywhere except the silhouettes. Cloud and smoke are worked wet into wet with no drawn edges anywhere, while the mountains and the tower have been cut in afterwards as flat dark shapes. That contrast is what keeps a very busy sky from swallowing a very thin building.

The proportions are the argument. In the books the tower is the largest structure anyone in the story has ever seen, and it is still a small thing set against the country it commands and the weather that country generates. A painting that gives four fifths of its surface to sky and rock, and a few square centimetres to the thing everyone came to look at, has understood the scale of the problem. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same summit reduced to a graphic device and the mountain that supplies the cloud.