The Fiery Eye Atop Barad-dûr Watching Over Mordor — Print & Oil Painting

A country made of fire has been painted almost entirely in cold grey. Slate, ash blue, gunmetal and a dull green carry the plain, the near ridges and most of the sky, and the measured saturation is low enough to confirm what the eye reports. Into that grey the painter has admitted exactly two warm things, and the discipline of that decision is what makes the picture work.

The first is at the top of the tower. A small hooked flame burns in a claw of black stonework at the summit, no larger on the canvas than a grain of rice, and it is the highest point in the composition. The tower under it is a rough black spike, wider at the base, with a scatter of tiny lit windows and a thin trickle of red at its foot where the rock has cracked.

The second is the mountain at the right, and it has been given far more paint. Lava runs down its flank in three or four branching threads, its crater glows dull orange under a vast ash plume that leans away to the right and fills a third of the sky, and the light from it fails to reach anything else in the picture.

Between them lies a wide flat plain of wet grey rock, and there is one figure standing on it. It is perhaps a hundredth of the height of the canvas, upright, arms slightly away from the body, facing the tower, and it is impossible to identify at this size. Its function is to make the distance readable, and it does that job better than any amount of detail would.

The important limitation of that light on the tower is that it has to be pointed. It is a searchlight rather than a ceiling lamp, it can only attend to one thing at a time, and the whole strategy of the war against its owner rests on that: keep it fixed on an army at the front door, and the back door stops being watched. A painting that gives it a single walker on an open plain and lets it stare somewhere else is stating the plan exactly. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same mountain with the sky torn open above it and two travellers crossing the same waste on foot.