Giant Fire Balrog versus Gandalf — Print & Oil Painting

The creature has not been painted. It has been left out. Every square centimetre of this canvas is fire, laid on thick in curling ropes of red, orange, gold and cream, and the animal is simply the shape where the painter stopped putting fire down: a wide dark silhouette with a horned head and both arms flung open, made entirely of the ground showing through.

Inside that absence there are exactly three marks. Two narrow white slits where eyes belong and one white gap for a mouth. It is the least drawing anywhere in the picture and it holds the entire composition together.

Two pale whips leave the shape at either side and curve out across the flames in long thin lines, one to the upper left and one to the right. They are the only fine drawing on a surface otherwise built from heavy loaded strokes, and the contrast between the two kinds of mark is what gives the picture its noise.

At the bottom centre, standing on nothing the painting has bothered to define, the man is small and dark: a blue-grey hat and cloak seen from behind, a blade angled up on the left, a faint white bloom of light around him. The measured saturation of this canvas is the highest in the entire group.

The thing on the bridge was a survivor of the elder world, and what it got in reply was one sentence and a staff. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside what happens after the bridge gives way.