Minas Tirith assault by Mordor — Print & Oil Painting

The paint is the first thing you notice and it stays the most interesting thing. This is thick oil laid on with a knife and a stiff brush, dragged, scraped and left standing in ridges, and the whole city has been built out of short vertical strokes of grey and cream pulled downward over a dark ground. Nothing is drawn. The tiers, the towers and the walls are all produced by the direction of the stroke.

The city occupies the left third and is wedged against the black flank of a mountain. Its levels stack upward in bands of pale scratching, a single needle of a tower stands at the crown catching the last light, and among the lower tiers a scatter of small orange marks has been dotted into the wet paint where fires are burning. There are perhaps thirty of them and each is one touch of the brush.

The centre of the canvas is given to a band of hot gold sky. It runs the full width just above the horizon, flaring to white at its brightest point, with heavy blue-black cloud rolled over the top of it and a smear of the same dark weather closing the right edge. Two small winged shapes hang in that cloud at the upper right, no bigger than punctuation.

The whole lower half is the enemy, and it has been handled as pure texture: an enormous field of dark green-brown worked over with thousands of tiny flicks and scratches, denser toward the city, thinning as it runs to the horizon. Read as landscape it is scrub and furrow. Read as an army it is uncountable, which is the point.

The place was built to be looked at from exactly this angle. Its seven walls each carry a gate, and no two of those gates are set at the same point of the compass, so that an attacker who forces one is immediately turned sideways along a wall and has to start again. That is a building designed by people who expected this evening to arrive. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same siege painted after dark and the machine brought up to open the lowest gate.