Minas Morgul Glowing With Sickly Light at Night — Print & Oil Painting

The paint has been allowed to run. Every wall, spire and buttress in this city is streaked from top to bottom with long vertical drips, laid on wet and then dragged down, so that the whole front of the place looks as though it were dissolving while it was being painted. That is the decision the picture is built on, and almost nothing in it has been given a clean edge.

The architecture underneath is three great pointed towers with a fourth rising behind them, all leaning very slightly inward, a black arched gate at the centre and a small horned emblem hung above it. From the gate the central shaft climbs into a crown of spikes that breaks up against the smoke. The sky around it is soot, worked thick and left unresolved.

The light is the wrong colour and that is the whole effect. Everything lit here is a cold blue-green, somewhere between verdigris and standing water, and the source is not in the sky: the stone appears to be glowing on its own account, brightest along the drips, darkest in the recesses. A handful of small yellow points burn along the low wall at the bottom and they are the only warm marks anywhere on the canvas.

The foreground belongs to a bridge. It comes out of the lower left corner on one shallow arch, painted in the same wet greens, with a row of small pennants standing along its parapet and nothing at all moving on it.

The book is precise about this light and gives it a name. It is paler than a moon in slow eclipse, it wavers like an exhalation of decay, and it lights nothing: a corpse-light. A painter who lets the colour bleed down the masonry has found the one way to show a glow that falls on no surface. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the two carved watchers at the head of that bridge and the stair that climbs inside the walls.