Gandalf Standing Beneath the Balrog's Blazing Head — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is taller than it is wide and the arithmetic of that decision is brutal. The creature occupies the upper three quarters, the man occupies the bottom eighth, and between them there is a stretch of falling embers that belongs to neither. You read the picture from the floor upward, which means you meet the boots before the face and the face last of all.

Its head is stated with two strokes. Two long horns arc across the very top of the frame as bright curved bands, wider than the figure below is tall, and beneath them a mask of fire opens with a pair of glaring apertures and a mouth. Everything between the horns and the mouth is left as smoke and heat, so the head is more a diagram of a head than a drawing of one.

The little figure at the bottom has both arms up and apart in a wide V, a staff in one hand throwing a cold blue-white flare, a blade in the other. His hat is still on. He stands on broken ground with rubble around his feet and his robes lit from above by the thing he is shouting at.

The colour discipline is severe: umber, oxblood, soot, and a graduated orange that gets hotter as it rises. Sparks are flicked across the whole surface at several sizes, and one long spear of flame crosses the middle of the canvas diagonally, aimed down at the figure.

What makes the confrontation coherent rather than absurd is that the two of them are the same kind of creature. Both are spirits of the same order sent into the world long before either wore a body, one bound to fire and one to a grey cloak and an old man's knees, and both are quite aware of it. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same pair composed across a wide canvas and the staff raised without the sword.